Gramsci's mistake

The current political crisis in the West would not originate in Marxist populism, but in its correction by Gramsci; who, observing the deficiencies of Marx's economic determinism, recognized that of his own cultural determination. That is no small thing, Marxism limited itself to recognizing the superstructural function of religion, taken from Feuerbach; but Gramsci identified its simple instrumentality, recognizing the superstructure in culture itself.

In reality, Gramsci also erred by excess, attributing substantive value to the superstructural function of culture; whose determination did not come from the economic power of capitalism, but from its function as ontological. This is the problem with the dialectic of history, starting from history itself as a total reality and not its expression; which would be determined in the transhistoricity of culture, as a function of reality in its specialization as human.

Because of that, the political problem is not exactly ideological but epistemological, given in this ideological reduction; which comes from political determinism, as a hermeneutic —in epistemological function— already given of the real. In this sense, for example, the worker does not vote against his interests, which are in capitalist realization; but against those of the intellectual middle class, which is the one in conflict with the bourgeoisie, because of its unproductivity.

The latter is understood from the very anthropological nature of culture, whose ultimate expression is politic; which is organized in a social structure, in which relations are capitalist, as the power (potency) of realization. The question is anthropological, because it resides in the codification of capital as a set of resources, which are existential; and that only because of this existential function —in its potentiation of culture— does it become political, not the other way around.

It is in this that the interests of the workers —as human beings— are in social realization, which is thus capitalist; just like that of the middle class and the bourgeoisie itself, as classes only because of their political and not ethical specialization. The contradiction is then always between opposing and not continuous interests, such as those of the productive process; but of the conception of capital as economic or political, respectively by the bourgeoisie or the intellectual elite.

However, given its own political determinism rather than cultural existentialism, Marxism does not understand it; assuming its capitalization of culture as legitimate, within the framework of Kantian categorical transcendentalism. It is not then that culture fulfills this superstructural function, without the fact that it is not a given superstructure; nor that it is not resolved in religion, as Feuerbach had already intuited from Kantian negativism itself; but that all this would be the way in which the real organizes itself as human, in capitalist relations as functionals.

The proof would be in this same ideological reduction of dialectical materialism, as capitalization of politics; which is an economic order, although now —thanks to Feuerbach's inversion— against reality itself. This would be due to this determinism, which would attack this specialization of the real as human, in the political; which, displacing culture in its determination of society, distorts it in its economic relations as political functions.

Here, Feuerbach's inversion would not overcome the epistemological problem of German philosophy, as an ideology; but would displace it towards religious representation, just as Marx would preserve its hermeneutical structure. German ideology would therefore not be about a doctrinal continuity, but about a common epistemological organization; which, from this idealism, tends to reduce the real by reducing it to its representation, giving it as substantive. In this sense, the critique of ideology would not be solely or mainly political, but above all epistemological; in its conversion of particular determinations of knowledge, into universal principles of interpretation of the real.

This is the value of Transcendental Realism, in its observation of culture as an ontological function, proper to the real; which therefore superimposes itself on the political expression in which it is realized, in its transhistoricity. In short, it is this transhistoricity what gives it its superstructural value, in the concrete functions in which it is realized; traditionally solved in religiosity, by the axial property of the cultural function, in its reflexivity.