Date: Fri, 12 May 1995 09:28:34 +0800
From: rgeeland-AT-cc.curtin.edu.au (David Geelan)
Subject: HAB: Habermas & Marx


I sent a brief private note to James McFarland, thanking him for his
balanced critique of my post "Working Class Habermas". His response to me
was so useful that I requested his permission to post it to the group
generally, which he graciously granted.

For me, this is a very useful discussion of similarities and differences
between Habermas and Marx, which was, after all, the intended topic for
discussion. Let me take this opportunity to apologise to both those who
winced at the naivety of my original posting, and those who've had to put
up with my very public education. I hope it's been interesting to others as
well!

I'd also like to take the opportunity to thank Norma Romm for her
contributions: they too exhibit a concern for communication and
understanding.

Here's the discussion with James:

>James
>
>Since I've already responded to the list with a few points in relation to my
>critics, I didn't want to burdern it >further for a while: I'll wait 'til the
>dust settles a bit.
>
>I'm sending this to your private address because I didn't want to wait to
>thank you for your fair and balanced >response. Discussion like this, even
>when someone does implant their foot firmly in their mouth, is the way
>>forward.
>
>I will do as you suggest, and attempt to overcome my ignorance of Marx's work
>(something the more >extreme letters definitely didn't inspire me to).
>
>Thanks again, David

>>David,
>>
>>There is certainly no shame in not having read or studied a particular
>>thinker: no one, after all, was born with an understanding of the Marxian
>>critique of capitalism, and often the most vitriolic proponents have come
>>to it late. You know what is said of converts...
>>
>>Vis. Habermas and Marx, in H's essay Die nachholende Revolution (the
>>compensatory Revolution), he outlines five fundamental points where he
>>considers the Marxian paradigm outworn or in need of revision: (I'm
>>translating on the fly here) "a)The [Marxist] analysis remained fixated
>>on phenomena that arose within the workers' society. With the choice of
>>this paradigm, a concept of praxis takes precidence that lends an
>>unambiguously emancipatory role to industrial labor and the develpment of
>>technical productive forces.... b) The analysis was moreover committed to
>>a holistic understanding of society: an originally  social [sittliche]
>>totality is broken and deformed through the class struggle and in
>>modernity through the reifying force of the capitalistic economic
>>process... In this way the theory is made blind to the particular
>>systematic imperatives [systematische Eigensinn] of a differentiated
>>market economy, whose control functions cannot be replaced by
>>administrative planning without jeopardizing the level of differentiation
>>achieved in modern societies. c) The analysis remained beholden to a
>>concretizing understanding of conflicts and social actors inasmuch as it
>>counted on social classes or historical macrosubjects to be the bearers
>>of the production and reproduction process of the society.... d)Of more
>>practical moment than the aforementioned deficit was the limited
>>functionalistic understanding of the democratic state-form, that Marx saw
>>realized in the Third Republic and scornfully denounced as 'vulgar
>>democracy.'... e) Finally, the analysis remained in the tradition of a
>>Hegelian intellectual strategy that attempted to maintain the
>>non-fallibalist epistemological pretentions of philosophy together with a
>>modern historical thinking... The hidden normativity of
>>philosophical-historical assumptions was retained in the naturalistic
>>form of an evolutionary concept of progress."(p. 189-91).
>>
>>So for Habermas, Marx is a necessary step on the way to conceptualizing
>>our current social situation, but a step that needs to be itself
>>critically appropriated (by means, primarily, of Weber).
>>
>>For my own part, I am not completely convinced that H's characterizations
>>of Marx are justified or could not be addressed from within that
>>paradigm, but that would take much too much time for me to defend, even
>>if I were familiar enough with the literature to do that. Clearly, any
>>thinking person is going to be leery of the gravitational pull of
>>dogmatism that surrounds a thinker like Marx, and H's resistance to that
>>is admirable. But it is also important not to lose sight of why we want
>>to understand the world: it is not as if the injustice of our current
>>situation were a minor imperfection on a system that for the most part is
>>running smoothly. The instabilities of the capitalist accumulation
>>process are extreme, and the injustice of its implimentation outrageous.
>>It is, to wax maudlin, for the sake of the children that we learn these
>>things; the children sewing sneakers in Micronesia, or shimmying beside
>>brass poles in the brothels of Bangkok.

Thanks again to all of you,  David