From: James McFarland <rmutt-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: HAB: Working Class Habermas
Date: Wed, 10 May 1995 09:02:26 -0400 (EDT)


>         All the whining about preserving this list's right to remain silent
> in sectarian isolation was a bit much, but Mr. Geelan's post made me really
> sorry I didn't unsubscribe to this list sooner. Mr.Geelan classifies Marx
> as the theoretician of class and economy whom one turns to in small,
> homeopathic doses when one runs into an icky class problem in backwards
> countries with vulgar and uppity workers, but is otherwise best kept in
> history's fruit cellar.  All that despite a profound ignorance of Marx!  Of
> course, Mr. Geelan's protest that he "does not think in class terms at all"
> only marks him as someone unable to think beyond the limits of bourgeois
> thought.  The condescending remarks about trade unions reveal a bourgeois
> authoritarianism.  Just because Mr. Geelan finds no problems from his
> particular social position does not mean that his satisfaction should be
> normative, nor does it follow that conscioussness of the differences
> between jobs of execution and direction is somehow off-limits.  I find his
> anecdotes about Australia's transcendance of class highly dubious, but even
> if we accept them for the sake of argument, we must note that the
> Australian worker's paradise in no small way depends on exploited labour in
> places like S.E. Asia or even the United States.  The concluding remarks
> remind me of a bourgeois Haitian's comments on Aristide and his supporters
> to the effect that they were tearing the country apart along class lines.
> A pity indeed.  Moreover, the idea that Hab is more universal and thus more
> powerful than Marxism is just another instance of Geelan's ignorance.  Even
> vulgar Marxists sang that "the International Union shall be the human
> race."

The aggressive and personalized tenor of Mr. Yasko's polemic
notwithstanding, these are several accurate and important criticisms of a
general banalization of Marx and the potency of Marxist analyses that are
common to many more people than just Mr. Geelan and Dr. Habermas. In fact,
I find Mr. Geelan's forthright admission of ignorance of Marx quite
refreshing, and for my part, I would urge him to spend a little time with
Capital, the German Ideology, and of course the Manifesto, rather than
dismissing him as a bourgeois, which describes most of us, I suspect. In
particular, Mr. Geelan, your understanding of the concept of class is too
superficial to allow you to give Marx his due. It is true that in common
usage in America (and I imagine Australia as well), class is defined in
terms of the subjective attitudes and typical behaviors of groups of
people, often coded in a system of brand-names or particular sartorial
fashions. Paul Fussell wrote an entertaining book on precisely this notion
of class. But it is not the Marxist notion. What class you belong to in
Marx has nothing to do (at first) with what you believe or how you dress.
It has to do with your position in the cycle of production. If you own the
means of production, you are in one class, the capitalist class;  if you
work for wages, i.e. for those that own the means of production, you are
in the other class, the proletarian class. There is no "middle class."
Obviously this is a radical abstraction from the complexity of a
functioning capitalist economy, where management level positions and civil
servants and stock exchanges complicate the picture, but it is no more
abstract than the neoclassical economic models for which Nobel Prizes are
given, and it has the advantage of being an abstraction from the society
as a whole, and not from some ill-defined economic sector of the society.
In any case, the extent to which these objective economic distinctions
enter into the psychological constitutions of the people socialized within
them, whether or not class position can be turned into a positive,
emancipatory component of self-understanding, these are questions that do not
directly bear on the reality of the classes themselves. I can assure you
that Australia, which is a capitalistically organized nation, has the
classes that are inherent to that form of organization. It is this that
the Marxian (and the Habermasian) concept of class addresses. Mr. Yasko 
is also quite correct to draw your attention to the international 
dimensions of this form of organization, and the mystifying effects that 
it has on those such as ourselves who benefit from the division of labor. 
Much of the labor-intensive, proletarian aspects of production have now 
been situated in countries where repression and policing are less 
encumbered by concerns for the individual than they are in Australia. My 
Timex watch, for instance, was made in England (ie capital intensive 
parts manufactured where the machines are), but assembled in Tiawan 
(labor-intensive screwing of tiny screws where the little fingers of 
children are available). You will no doubt be able to find similar 
examples where you live. Neoclassical economics speaks of "comparative 
advantages" making international trade more than a zero-sum game, but the 
advantage in many cases is a higher tolerance for class unrest and the 
brutality that accompanies its control. These are extremely ugly facts 
that are easy to loose sight of in the course of studying Habermas, whose 
relation to these things has become tenuous. They are certainly grounds 
for outrage, and these are not, moreover, particularly pleasant times for 
Marxists, so tempers get short. But it is not because Marx has been 
invalidated or superceded that he is now in disrepute: it is because he 
continues to represent a powerful threat to self-consious interests that 
he is being actively dismissed. You owe it to yourself, I think, to 
aquaint yourself more thoroughly with this extremely potent body of thought.

Jim McFarland