Date: Tue, 23 Sep 1997 02:31:44 +1000
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: M-TH: Habermas and Marxism


G'day Thaxists,

I'm too tired to drive home just now, so I think I'll blather on about
Habermas whether you're interested or not.  After all, any bloke who causes
a generation of pomos as much discomfort as this bloke has can't be all bad.

First things first (oh yes, I'm gonna have more to say about Habermas
later) - and this is the bit I'd really like someone to take an interest in.

How Marxist is Habermas?

Well, Habermas is a fair-dinkum Frankfurter.  He is first and foremost a
philosopher (I banged on about this a couple of days ago), and joins his
forebears in framing capitalism and 'orthodox' marxism (in this context, I
take this to mean vulgar scientistic marxism in its Stalinist incarnation)
as the salient pathology of modernity.  For Habermas, Marx the philosopher
is forgotten or misunderstood and, given the apparent stability of post-war
capitalism and the last gasps of Stalinism in the world, we might best be
served to resume our critiques at the level of philosophy.  Time, in other
words, for a bit of 'ruthless criticism'.

For this, Habermas turns to analytic philosophy and an effort to construct
as comprehensive an account of rationality as can withstand assault (of
which French irrationalism has provided plenty).  One step he takes in this
grand undertaking is to distinguish between 'work' and 'interaction'.  He
does this to ground a logically subsequent distinction between
'instrumental action' (as in 'work' - where resides the instrumental
rationality that Frankfurters believe has become so dominant as to exhaust
our current self-definition) and communicative action (as in 'interaction'
- 'subject' acting with and among 'subjects' rather than upon 'object/s').
This hurts, as it involves, it seems, the equation of 'work' with Marx's
foundational notion of 'labour' and therefore, via the notion of
'interaction', a new category that seems to be independent of what Marxists
would call history.

Habermas needs to do this because he is a Frankfurter at bottom and sees in
the development of the forces of production something orthodox Marxists do
not see.  Where most of us see an inevitable structural crisis built into a
dynamic by which those forces must one day come into internally insoluble
conflict with relations of production (because for us 'labour' is a
contradictory unity constituted by both forces and relations, or
'interactions', of production),  Habermas sees the creeping ascendancy of a
narrow technocratic way of seeing:  with 'the expansion of the rational
form of science and technology ... to the proportions of a life form, of
the "historical totality" of a life world', science and technology become
ideology.  Back to Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, eh?

Anyway, the beauty of an independent 'interaction' category is that it
offers an escape hatch for those convinced by Habermas's pessimistic
forebears.  In positing a rationality (ie. 'communicative') that is
logically independent (if historically fragile), Habermas is suggesting we
need look for or try to construct real or virtual spaces as undistorted by
differential power as possible.  'There', we can pursue our emancipation by
recognising in language (any language) something that exists precisely so
that the mutual understanding upon which we social creatures depend can
come about.  As mutual understanding alone, dependent on historically
embedded norms as it is, is insufficient to uncover 'ideology' (meant, I
think, as Gramsci meant 'hegemony'), we must learn from the tradition of
psychoanalysis and assume the posture of subjects in need of a transforming
confrontation with the hitherto hidden causes of our neuroses.

Yep, it seems we're back to Marcuse's *Eros*.  A book I enjoyed but never
found convincing - because Freud just doesn't do it for me, I guess.

Anyway, back to communication and language.  To quote Habermas:  'The human
interest in autonomy and responsibility is not mere fancy, for it can be
apprehended *a priori*.  What raises us out of nature is the only thing
whose nature we can know: language.  Through its structure, autonomy and
responsibility are posited for us.  Our first sentence expresses
unequivocally the intention of universal and unconstrained consensus.'

Well, now I'm too tired not to drive home.  Soon, I'll try to develop this
a little, to get towards Bill Cochrane's ideas about censorship.  In
closing, I think Habermas has to confont two reasonable questions in light
of the above.

1)  How much damage does his separation of work and interaction do to a
coherent socialist politics? (Therborn, for instance, went ballistic about
this, claiming (a) that the move was generated by the moot ideas that
historical materialism had been falsified by post-war experience, that
there is no longer a proletariat worth the name, and that 'therefore' all
that is left of Marxism is his earlier philosophical musing, and (b) that
Habermas's communicative turn is basically just so much idealism (both the
problems and solutions of politics existing at the level of 'the idea'.)

2)  Can we know the nature of language (in a universalist sense)?  If so,
what's wrong with asserting that we can know the nature of capitalism?
Perhaps thus:  Our first exchange expresses unequivocally the intention of
universal and unconstrained accumulation ...

If you're still reading, ta very much.  If I'm going over very old ground
for you, sorry.

G'Night,
Rob.

PS  I paraphrased the more coherent parts of all this from a beaut new book
by a mate of mine at the ANU, David West (*An Introduction to Continental
Philosophy*.  1996. Polity: Cambridge UK.)  It's yours for the price of
half a dozen pints of Fullers Extra Special Bitter (I don't know how many
Budweisers that represents).  Save yourselves a hangover.


************************************************************************

Rob Schaap, Lecturer in Communication, University of Canberra, Australia.

Phone:  02-6201 2194  (BH)
Fax:    02-6201 5119

************************************************************************

'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have
lightened the day's toil of any human being.'    (John Stuart Mill)

"The separation of public works from the state, and their migration
into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates
the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in
the form of capital."                                    (Karl Marx)

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