Date: Tue, 9 May 1995 12:14:21 -0400
From: howleyc-AT-ael.org (Craig Howley)
Subject: Re: HAB: Habermas, Merging and the Working Class



David G--

I'm not exactly sure what you're suggesting, but anything that would carry
the conversation forward would suit me.  So I offer further reflections on
the working class.

One of the points to appreciate in Marx relevant to concern for "the working
class" is the sense of contradiction and struggle.  Call him an agonist.
Habermas' scheme of things -- e.g., the emancipatory interest, systematic
distortion -- seems to involve a sense struggle.  But it remains curiously
abstract in the things I've read, anyhow.  Marx, on the other hand, in a
closer analysis of the economic basis of social life (don't get too hung up
about 'materialism,' as it's a big mistake to call Marx a materialist)
brought the analysis down to struggle between classes ca. 1870, with the
proletariat as the destined class.  And remember, there were a lot of people
involved with agriculture in the modern world of 1870.  Trouble is, the
proletariat is a vanishing breed.  Industrial jobs have diminished by 50%
since 1960 according to Jeremy Rifkin (**The End of Work**).  One might
argue that the information workers have become the darlings of "history."
Or maybe it's robotics.  Rifkin quotes Peter Drucker to the effect that the
complete elimination of human labor from the production process is the
unfinished business of capitalism.  So not only the proletariat, but even
the working class as a whole, may be in sharp decline.  Maybe this makes
Habermas more 'relevant' than Marx, but it's a silly question; except that
capital and its regime of accumulation proceeds, with ominous implications
for humans, and so the notion of social struggle with its roots in class
differences persists.

How does Habermas construe power?  It's related systematically to distorted
communication, right?  But what about distorted economics?

--Craig Howley