File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1996/96-10-22.195, message 71


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 ---


   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005