Date: Wed, 10 May 1995 08:29:42 -0400
From: howleyc-AT-ael.org (Craig Howley)
Subject: Re: HAB: Working Class Habermas



David--

Mostly I was being provocative with the claim that "Marx is not a
materialist."  Strictly speaking, though, the claim is at least defensible,
if you understand Marx as distancing himself from the British empiricists
(Bentham et cie.) and the French physiocrats.  After all, he referred to his
method as **dialectical** materialism, with the 'dialog' being carried on
partly in economic and partly in ideologic terms by social groups called
'classes.'  Marx was never actually too clear about class structure,
interestingly, except to develop in his work the opposition of the
industrial proletariat and the class controlling capital.  The Marxian
vision is not, in my view, at all inconsistent with Habermas's view of
undistorted communicative action and realization of the emancipatory
interest.  It's just more abstract in Habermas, as befitting someone who
pledges stronger allegiance to Kant than did Marx.  What Marx does, and this
is why I continue to respect his ideas, is to insist that life has a
material **base.**  That still doesn't make him a materialist, not by a long
shot.  There is that wonderful section early in Capital (v1), where he
deconstructs the idea of commodity to reveal it as not a thing in itself but
as constituted of human labor in trade.  So economics is not principally
about things (as with the neoclassicist economists whom ye have always with
ye) but about social relationships.  The point of political economy (as
opposed to the project of neoclassicist apologists for capital) is to
examine the social relations of production.  Sure, Marx wasn't very keen on
semiotics.  Big deal.  It was the middle of the 19th century.  Do we fault
Plato for not designing an education for the 21st century?  Actually, his
ideas are a lot more interesting (at the least) than much of the garbage
spread about on that (21st century) head.

Capitalists persist; their project consumes the world.  That fact alone (for
me) warrants the notion of class struggle.  But look around, around the
world, and even, God bless us, Australia!  Class (remember:  the social
relations of production), one must appreciate, works through such handy
hooks as age, gender, skin color, religion (there's a good one!), without
being reducible to any.  Class struggle is not usually conducted as open
class warfare; how could it be?  That has not proven productive for
capitalism, anyhow.  One wants to minimize conflict, and this, of course, is
where equilibrium theorists venture their careers--Adam Smith's invisible
hand keeping things in healthy balance for ceaseless accumulation.  And
that's one of things that personally distresses me with Habermas's
appropriations from Parsons.  Parsons, doubtless, had some insights; but
they are bland by comparison to the nature of Marx's and Habermas's.
Perhaps Habermas doesn't read English, so he can't know that Parsons
developed an ersatz Germanic style, the circumlocutions and abstractions
severed from their roots.  Bad intellectual news.  See C. Wright Mills'
**Sociological Imagination**, the chapter on "Grand Theory" for a witty
assessment of Parsons.

The problem with Marx, as with so many insightful thinkers, is that he died.
And his analysis was more narrowly focused than, say, Habermas's.  Further,
the unlikely applications in Russian and China, and the consequent debacles,
have left many people unwilling to dig deeper into Marx--deeper for the
concepts that remain applicable.  Capitalism has changed.  The proletariat's
time has come and gone.  If Drucker is right about the unfinished business
of capitalism being the elimination of human labor from production,
realizing that unfinished work will only sharpen the class struggle.  It's
decidedly **not* a harbinger of a classless society.

--Craig Howley