Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1996 17:39:35 +1000 From: rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au (Rob Schaap) Subject: M-I: Re: A Revolutionary Class Louis Proyect is trying to give this thread some shape, and I shall take advantage by asking a few questions about Habermas's potential to Marxists. Now, I know many Marxists are suspicious of H's apparent relegation of the revolutionary class from its transformational significance in Marxist thinking. Nevertheless, does Habermas not point us to the role of communication in that ever-problematic moment of uniting the proletariat's objective and subjective interests? While my earlier post (about threats to the whole notion of class identification due to, if you will, the excising of workers and the unemployed from their traditional social contexts) excited no comment, I still think a practical issue arises here. One can, in a 'society' constituted ever more by isolated individuals, not afford to underestimate the significance of communication. To be a proletariat in any practical sense, is to be aware as a collective of a collective identity. You don't have to be very old to remember days when social intercourse was daily inevitable. This is no longer the case here, where neither labour nor recreation/recuperation is predicated on communal activity. In the lives of many of us, the sum-total of daily experience of 'communication' is provided by a standardised mainstream mass media. We are passive in this and the communication, such as it is, is not with peers (neither perceived nor actual, I submit). A collective is constituted by communication, its own participation in itself, if you like. As others have said, our objective interests are a condition for change, not a guarantee of it. Theory is practice when proletarians talk to each other, allowing their structural identity to surface by way of the pursuit of mutual understanding on matters of common interest. 'Citizenship' as a practice, is to do with speaking and listening in this spirit. The beauty of that simple proposition is that no classical liberal could deny this. The tragedy is that even communication, in this technologically mediated society, can be, and is being, commodified. 'Citizenship' equals equality on significant criteria. If communication is its currency (and it is), then the commodification of communication is the death of democracy (in whatever sense you like). That's a nice way of highlighting an inherent capitalist contradiction (capitalism always legitimises itself with reference to 'democracy'), but it is also of profound concern, I would have thought, to a Marxist. Waddya reckon? Cheers, Rob. --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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