Sobre ética y política (apuntes acerca de una relación no-lineal)

The ethical cannot be reduced to political efficacy, as imagined at times by the ideological left. Clearly, it is also the case that politics cannot be reduced to being read in ethical terms, a misunderstanding firmly entrenched in times of the crisis of representation. “Ethicism” in political interpretation tends to delegitimize said interpretation as it prevents an understanding of its intrinsic functioning. There is also an “ethicism of the left” which, without understanding socio-structural factors, interpreted support for the Soviet state as simply an ethical abandonment of the emancipating principles of Marxism. But the idea that revolutionary thought can dispense with ethics tends to predominate, since political efficacy would be, in and of itself, ethical as regards the social benefits hoped for. It is not hard to predict the unfortunate consequences of the legitimatization of terror or absolutism that follow from an assumption that simply superimposes the ethical on the political.