Bourgeois democracy’s immanent antinomy makes extra-parliamentary action the only contestation

Evidence

But that means, in my view: in order to remain our old Institute', we have to write and act differently today from the way we did in the 1930s . . . You write, introducing your concept of coldness’, that we would even have put up with the murder of the Jews at the time, without moving over into praxis, simply because it was barred to us'. Yes, and today, precisely, it is not barred to us. The difference in the situation is that between fascism and bourgeois democracy. The latter gives us freedoms and rights. But to the extent to which bourgeois democracy (because of its immanent antinomy) blocks qualitative change, even through the parliamentary democratic system itself, the extra-parliamentary opposition becomes the only form of contestation’: `civil disobedience’, direct action. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 668

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The argument that democracy’s own internal contradiction converts its guaranteed freedoms into a dead end, forcing direct action — a structural claim that reframes whether silence equals complicity.
• XREF: Resonates with Adorno’s ‘what once seemed barred to us is no longer barred’ reasoning in the same volume and with the Frankfurt School’s debate over praxis.