▲Protests held on December 20, 2023 in Buenos Aires against the Argentine president, Javier Milei.Xinhua Photo
F
ue Bourdieu who understood that one of the defining qualities of modern states is their ability to monopolize the sources of enunciation of truths social with binding effect in a territory. It is not that his statements are true; In fact, they are often false, but they are regularly accepted as true by a society that assumes, tolerates and complies with them. He called this the state monopoly of symbolic capital, which allows its actions and statements to generally carry an implicit collective consensus.
The core of legitimacy
Certainly, the State is not the only bearer of legitimacy. Civil society is always the original source of consensus, and within it there are multiple engines of legitimation, such as the media, churches, universities, unions, intellectuals, influencers, etc. But these are fragmented legitimacies, referring to the members of the religious brotherhood, to the participants in a branch of public opinionto the members, etc. On the other hand, universal, general legitimations, common to all, tend to be concentrated in the State.
For example, the monopoly on qualifications that certify academic knowledge; the elaboration of laws that would supposedly favor all citizens equally, or the exercise of public security that reduces crimes, etc. It does not matter if the student obtained grades for economic favors, or if such a law resulted from bribes to rulers to favor some private real estate deal, or if property infractions decrease at the expense of an increase in assaults with the use of violence, etc. In the end, state certification guarantees the TRUE of acquired knowledge, of the collective benefit of the law or of the reduction of crime. The State can carry out these arbitrary actions with public resources without a large part of the population finding out or, when they find out, they do so by accepting what official information and official spokespersons justify.
This legitimacy of state actions is verified when the social order functions regularly. But legitimacy is paralyzed or fragmented when the economic or political regime enters into crisis. State statements are no longer credible; Their narratives do not generate adhesions and compliance with their provisions is called into question. It is as if the State and its officials, until then bearers of a certain aura of excellence and superiority, returned to the earthliness of daily discredit and challenge.
It happened in Argentina in 2002 after the failure of convertibility; happened in Greece after the recession and austerity imposed by the European troika and, in general, with the rise of the cycle of social protests and the arrival of progressive governments or populists in Latin America and other regions of the world. The one that the emergence of governments populists Come in the midst of economic malaise, the loss of income, recognition or the collective feeling of a grievance on the part of the old elites, is not a minor fact. He talks about how the monopoly of legitimacy always requires a materiality of verisimilitude, without which it simply collapses.
The Bourdian response that the state monopoly of symbolic power is sufficient in itself to found its effectiveness cannot explain why in times of crisis, state legitimation erodes or collapses, which is the equivalent of answering what it is. holds.
And the state monopoly of legitimate enunciation has as its underlying condition the monopoly of the common goods, conditions and resources of society. As Karl Marx pointed out: that is precisely the core of the State and on whose management the ranges of credibility or disbelief of state statements rest.
The condition of possibility of state legitimacy lies in relatively universal of those common goods and conditions (taxes, public wealth, rights, recognition, social welfare, etc.). Economic stability and guaranteed basic rights establish a framework for tolerant reception of state emissions and enable a partisan political struggle around this centrality. But when society’s material and symbolic goods contract, they are distributed in aggressively segmented ways; when the general conditions of social life are fractured, what is common (due to monopolies) is no longer credible; That is, state authority corrodes, giving rise to a crisis of hegemony.
A state regime can coexist with the degradation of living conditions, social anger, the loss of rights and even the arbitrary exercise of repression, as long as it concerns minority segments of the population: social minorities, union branches, students or inhabitants of a region. But when the deterioration of living conditions affects social majorities, when the curtailment of some right is generalized, the offense or repression is indiscriminate, the sense of the common, of the universal is put in check and, with it, the very plausibility of the current state regime. These are times of discredit of the rulers; The monopoly of state consensus is breaking down everywhere. The government is no longer credible and no matter what it does, it will always be under public suspicion or ridicule.
Economic crises, cuts in rights or recognitions always precede a paralysis and fragmentation of state legitimacy, since the imagined common predictive horizon, around which families and social classes organize the expected course of their lives, becomes unhinged, collapses, dismembering the sense of cohesion and shared destiny. The divergence of political elites, social polarization, which has sometimes led to the rise of progressivism (Latin America, Spain, Great Britain), authoritarianism and populism (Trump, Orban, Meloni) in the recent two decades, have been preceded of economic retractions and visibility of grievances, typical of the descending phase of the global neoliberal economic order.
Fragmented legitimacy
The corrosion of state legitimacy does not necessarily misplace the source of social consensus. It causes a crisis of hegemony, a crisis of the state regime; that is, a stupor in the way of organizing common life and the imagined common destiny of societies. But it gives rise to the expansion of other sources of legitimacy from civil society, in the form of collective action, politicization of new previously apathetic sectors, abrupt changes in the topics of interest of public opinion, growing role of networks, prominence of new intellectuals, etc., who dispute credibility with the official discourse. When these sources of new consensus and reform projects of the State and the economy are channeled within the old system of political parties, schisms and profound reforms occur within its ideologies and economic proposals, but the hegemonic transition is carried out through regulated cataclysms. It is the path, for now, of the United States, Great Britain, Argentina with Kirchnerism. When social unrest is channeled outside the traditional party scheme, new disruptive political forces and discourses emerge, which reconfigure the party system, as in Brazil, France, Germany, Spain, Uruguay, or recently in Argentina. That political absurdities like Javier Milei in Argentina can impose monetarist archaisms as a solution to inflation problems is not a clever way of managing networks, but the result of a society’s boredom with an interventionist State that exhausted its reforms and led the country to an inflation of 160 percent annually.
But when the sources of legitimacy are parked in active nodes of mobilized civil society, such as unions, guilds, collective action flows and their emerging representatives, the crisis of state legitimacy is radical. We are not only facing the temporary exhaustion of a part of the truths state, but also the emergence of other truths with a claim to universality, to new cohesive commons. Therefore, a replacement of narratives and programs of the old elites will not be enough, as in the first case, nor an expansion of elites, as in the second, but it will lead to a replacement of social blocks with the capacity to produce new schemes. universal for the entire society, a new predictive horizon and, with it, a new social coalition with hegemonic capacity.
It is the moment of what Antonio Gramsci called a catastrophic tie between a source of state legitimacy in decline, threadbare and devalued, and sources of social legitimation that carry major social reforms.
That the conglomerate of institutions that monopolize the commons (the State) that is capable of mobilizing common resources appears to be in competition and even at a disadvantage before nodes of civil society whose virtue is, for now, only a promise of a way of organizing these common resources speaks of the political power of the collective imagination, the hope for those common resources when defining the formation of historical leaderships and lasting hegemonies.
In any case, what is relevant about the decline of a state legitimation system is the dissonance between state emission schemes and social reception scheme. It’s as if they speak different languages or the words have different meanings.
The madness and terrifying orphanhood that all this causes in the rulers is perfectly illustrated in the belief of the wife of Chilean President Piñera who described the 2019 insurrectionists as aliens.
At the same time, the paralysis of state beliefs cannot be indefinite, so, almost in parallel, growing sectors of the population are driven to embrace an availability or desire for new shared beliefs, opening an audience to the renovators of the old parties. , to those marginalized from the party system, now converted into champions of an intellectual and moral renewal of politics or, to the statements resulting from collective action.
And where the transition of state legitimation schemes is accompanied by social outbreaks, it is these social movements that also act as collective intellectuals capable of promoting cognitive breaks and adhesions in broad popular sectors. Collective action always acts as a cognitive epiphany, as a grammar of new possible courses of action of society on the ways of organizing life in common; that is, to dispute the legitimate universals of a society. What is studied in the literature as double power It is a radical variant of this disruptive factor of the sayable and the possible that accompany moments of social effervescence. In summary, these three forms of transition of a state legitimation regime will correspond to different institutional and discursive forms of formation of the new legitimacy regime.
Lost legitimacy
But it may also happen that the eclipse of a state legitimation regime is not accompanied by a substitute from the old party system, nor from outsiders; nor a regeneration from the absent social mobilization. And then, the social consensus enters a temporary period of decomposition, fragmented and in slow motion, which is precisely what is happening today in Bolivia. But clearly, this cannot be lasting either.
* He was vice president of Bolivia (2006-2019)
