Date: Thu, 16 Feb 1995 11:41:56 -0800 From: jones/bhandari <djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu> Subject: Habermas Mustapha, "Habermas does manage to allude towhat is, I think, a real tendency of capitalist development: namely, the progressive displacement of procedures of consensus-formation by systemic mechanisms of action action coordination With the extensive and intensive expansion of market relations that accompanies the accumulation of capital, the reproductive role of what Habermas calls 'communicative action' (at least in its *idealized* form as essentially non-coercive) is certainly diminished. But so long as Habermas's employment of the 'lifeworld' concept remains ambiguous between the 'lifworld' construed as objective 'domain of action', the thesis of 'lifeworld colonization' must take on the additional connotation of a *substantive* abuse of the latter....if the point of turning to value theory is to explain the systemic tendencies to expansion which have the result of curtailing the integrative scope of communicative interaction,then we had better avail ourselves in it of a conceptual framework that enables us to grasp the logic of those tendencies." >From John Rosenthal "What is Life?: a Habermas critique", SOCIAL SCIENCE INFORMATION, 31, 1 (1992), p. 8 I thought this article may be helpful; see also the chapter on Habermas in Moishe Postone's Time, Labor, and Social Domination, to which I have referred many times on this line. I also understand that Julius Sensat's Habermas and Marxism is very good, which is believable given the quality of the work of his which I have read. Hope this is helpful. Yours, Rakesh --- from list marxism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- ------------------
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