Habermas's Met a Critique of Marx

8/2/2019 Habermas's Met a Critique of Marx

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Jurgen Habermass Meta-critique of MarxianPraxis

by Joseph Belbruno

Habermas's "Erkenntnis und Interesse' can be found here:http://solomon.tinyurl.alexanderstreet.com/cgi-bin/asp/philo/soth/documentidx.pl?sourceid=S10023103or here in translation as "Knowledge and Human Interests":http://solomon.tinyurl.alexanderstreet.com/cgi-bin/asp/philo/soth/documentidx.pl?sourceid=S10023352

It would not be too unkind to say of Jurgen Habermas, the talentedepigone of the Frankfurt School of Philosophy, that he devoted hislifetime to bridging the gap between theory and practice. in theory

alone! And it is not too unkind to say this when one considers thatHabermas fundamentally misconstrued the entire Marxian notion ofpraxis intended in the Gramscian sense of an intellectual activitythat in its very theorization of capitalist society contains its critique in amanner that challenges directly and practicallythe operation of thesociety of capital and that by that very fact is the very first andnecessary step toward its overthrow.

The task ofcritique is invariably that of challenging the self-understanding of capitalist society so as to evince the elements ofantagonism that lie at its very core, that indeed form its essence, and

that occasion its crisis. And crisis is not a thing, but rather amoment, a point in time a co-incidence on the occurrence of whichwe need to be pre-pared, organized to trans-form the present order ofthings. The task of critique is therefore to outline the fault-lines in theantagonistic asset of capitalist society and governmentso as to preparethe organization for its eventual democratic overthrow.

Anyone who reviews Habermass theoretical oeuvre will be immediatelyand starkly aware of how far he was from this aspect of critique: at nostage did his enormous theoretical output tackle the all-importantquestion of exactly how his intellectual efforts could be applied to the

overthrow of capitalist society. For this is a task that must be mostprominent and at the forefront of all our intellectual efforts devoted tothe examination of the manner in which capitalism reproduces itself andtries to do so on an expanded scale.

It may well be that thepolitical problem of the hypostatization ofrevolutionary practical analysis into abstract and harmless theorybegins really with Marx himself and his notion of historical materialism
http://solomon.tinyurl.alexanderstreet.com/cgi-bin/asp/philo/soth/documentidx.pl?sourceid=S10023103http://solomon.tinyurl.alexanderstreet.com/cgi-bin/asp/philo/soth/documentidx.pl?sourceid=S10023103http://solomon.tinyurl.alexanderstreet.com/cgi-bin/asp/philo/soth/documentidx.pl?sourceid=S10023352http://solomon.tinyurl.alexanderstreet.com/cgi-bin/asp/philo/soth/documentidx.pl?sourceid=S10023352http://solomon.tinyurl.alexanderstreet.com/cgi-bin/asp/philo/soth/documentidx.pl?sourceid=S10023103http://solomon.tinyurl.alexanderstreet.com/cgi-bin/asp/philo/soth/documentidx.pl?sourceid=S10023103http://solomon.tinyurl.alexanderstreet.com/cgi-bin/asp/philo/soth/documentidx.pl?sourceid=S10023352http://solomon.tinyurl.alexanderstreet.com/cgi-bin/asp/philo/soth/documentidx.pl?sourceid=S10023352


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that tries to convey at once two antithetical subjecta or subject-mattersin its interpretation of human affairs: historyon the one hand as thesphere of human political action, and nature on the other as theobjective ground of all ontological reality. The difficulty emerges from asearly as the Theses on Feuerbach where the Eleventh Thesis reads:

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world; the point now isto change it. Here Marx seems to imply that it is possible to interpretthe world surely the task of theory without actually changing it.Here is precisely that separation, that Trennung, of intellectual andmanual labor, of direction or order and execution, of theory andpractice, of Politics and Economics, of Freedom and Necessity.

Indeed, here is precisely that separation of Subject and Object thatKant will sanction with the very first Critique that of Pure Reason that will seek to delimit the theoretical limits of human knowledge fromapurelytheoretical viewpoint or intuition (An-schauung) whereby it is

Reason that provides the guide, the direction to the human senses(Sinne) so that the mind or spirit (Geist) ultimately controls the bodyas in the Cartesian dualism ofres cogitans (the thinking and acting[co-agitare] thing) and res extensa (the inert, supine thing) theperfect synecdoche for Capital as command over living labor and theWorker as labor power to be commanded, directed. Recall Kantsneat and telling summation of his epistemology: Intuition withoutconcepts is blind [no direction, like manual labor] and conceptswithout intuition are empty[ideas cannot be put into practice, as withpurely intellectual labor]. It is thus that the separation of living laborfrom the means of production, which enables its reduction to abstract

laborunder the command of capital, turns into a corresponding divisionof social labor, between intellectual labor that commands so-calledmanual labor.

Or so at least the capitalist would have us believe. Thinkers as diverseas Weber and Arendt certainly fell into this prejudicial trap as thefollowing quotations illustrate. Which is not to say that there are notechnical reasons why social labor should not be divided: but noamount of technical rationality can impede the democratic supervisionof the most technical tasks of social labor!

Returning to Marx, we have seen how he too believed that it waspossible to separate reflection or consciousness that is, theory andinterpretation as an entity distinct from reality or the world, suchthat philosophers hitherto have only interpreted the world. Marxevidently neglects the fact that interpretations and theories arethemselves methods or modalities of human activity. Indeed, Marxhimself observed that what distinguishes human beings from otheranimals is just this ability to theorise or pro-ject conceptually


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beforehand the activities that they intend to undertake. But thisdichotomyand antithesis between thought as deliberation andaction as execution is exactly what lies at the source of the divisionof social labor and its separation from the means of production in thesociety of capital.

This separation (Trennung) and division (Krisis) needs to beunderstood and examined with a view to its overthrow andsupersession. The problem with thephilosophical approaches of Kantfirst for he was the one who first conceptualized this Krisis and thenHegel and Marx, who were more concerned with the Trennung that is,with the separation or alienation of living labor and its abstractioninto labor power is that they pre-suppose the existence of areality, of an objective substratum or world, that can be observed,theorized, and known scientifically. Differently put, all these theoriespresuppose the epistemological schism between knowing Subject and

known Object a schism that can be bridged either irrationally orschematically or else dialectically, but in any case only trans-scendentally, that is to say, only by leaving intact the epistemologicalseparation or break(coupure) between concept and reality. And this hasoccurred because in the past we have oriented human action in afashionpolarized between consciousness, the for-itself or action,and reality, the in-itself that is acted upon.

Had Marx been aware of Nietzsches own critique of Western, and mostspecifically of Kantian and Hegelian, metaphysics, he would doubtlesshave transliterated his Eleventh Thesis as follows: Philosophers and

scientists have hitherto claimed that they were only inter-preting theworld, whereas in fact they were elaborating strategies either to changeor to conserve it! If we turn Marxs dictum on its head like this, we soonrealize that in facttheory and practice were never separate and thattherefore philosophy and science are not ideologies in the senseintended by Marcuse or Heidegger that they contain a pre-conceivedprojector design of human action. The notion of ideology implies thatthere are theoretical practices that are non-ideological. Instead, theyshould be viewed as strategies that have specific finalities or goals withwhich we may agree or disagree but that in any case are never purelyspeculative or contemplative because they remain ineluctably forms of

human activity.

The problem revolves around the human temptation to separateconceptually the cosmos into subject and object, as if the mere fact thatthere are thoughts proved incontrovertibly that there are thinkersand, behind thinkers, subjects provided with a consciousnesscapable ofcom-prehending life and the worldautonomously from theselast, that is to say, freely and objectively, from an Archimedian


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point. The sooner we free our-selves from this pre-judice, the better.Quite rightly, Marx chastises Hegel for making precisely this error thatof mis-taking human objectification, the necessary human immanentinter-action with life and the world, with alien-ation, the falseconsciousness arising from the extrinsication of the Idea in time and in

space to the apotheosis ofab-solute knowledge, the ultimate stage ofthe Spirit or self-consciousness to the point where it en-compasses all itspredicates and attributes whereby it is ab-solved from furtherclarification. Hegel therefore mistakes life and the world, immanence,with the dialectical un-folding of the Idea: in short, Hegel mistakes Beingwith Logic.

Yet the opposite is not the case for Marx! If we consider Marxs work inits entirety, despite an undeniable scientistic streakin Capital, there isno question of his having reduced logic to being for the simplereason that this dichotomy does not occur in his oeuvre and certainly

not in the most mature exposition of his philosophical theorization ofcapitalist society in the Grundrisse. Such a theorization is essential, ofcourse, because the overthrow of capitalism has to be able tounderstand the needs that lead to it, has to be able to justify itself. Butthis self-understanding must occur in a historical perspective that isaimed not at a generic philosophical totality, at an all-encompassingontology. Rather, its principal aim and scope must be that of erecting anovel political orientation of human social relations of production, a re-orientation of social labor, to correct its ever-growing distortion on thepart of capitalist social relations of production.

Here is how Habermas characterizes (one could be vicious and saycaricatures) Marxs Entwurfin the light of our formulation of thisproblematic thus far:

Thus in Marx's works a peculiar disproportion arises between the practice ofinquiry [Forschungspraxis] and the limited philosophical self-understanding ofthis inquiry [Forschung]. In his empirical analyses Marx comprehends the historyof the species under categories of material activity and the critical abolition ofideologies, of instrumental action and revolutionary practice, of labor andreflection at once. But Marx interprets what he does in the more restrictedconception of the species' self-reflection through labor[Arbeit] alone. Thematerialist concept of synthesis is not conceived broadly enough in order to

explicate the way in which Marx contributes to realizing the intention of a reallyradicalized critique of knowledge. In fact, it even prevented Marx fromunderstanding his own mode of procedure from this point of view. (K&HI, p.42.)

Obvious here is the intention on the part of Habermas to distinguish thepractice of inquiry from thephilosophical self-understanding ofinquiry. Marx called his theoretical activity critique precisely for thereason that it was never intended as mere analysis or dia-gnosis of the


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workings and status of capitalism but rather as a practical project, a dia-noia, whose very content, even the most theoretical and ana-lytical,had to be designed to put into political practice the overthrow ofcapitalist social relations of production, namely, the command by deadlabor over living labor. Though it is possible, and we would argue even

correct, to contend that Marxs own account of the social synthesis wasdefective, it certainly does not help matters if we start splitting hairs inthe manner Habermas suggests, by engaging in renewed analyses notjust of the practice of inquiry which may be politically justifiedbecause there is an immediate link with praxis but also of thephilosophical self-understanding of this inquiry because at that stagewe already indulging in what threatens to become an endless chain ofmeta-critiques of knowledge that rapidly spiral into completeirrelevance to anything practical in a Marxian sense!

What troubles Habermas is the alleged fact that Marx interprets what

he does in the more restricted conception of the species' self-reflectionthrough labor[Arbeit] alone, whereas in his empirical analysesMarx had more properly comprehend[ed] the history of the speciesunder categories of material activity and the critical abolition ofideologies, of instrumental action and revolutionary practice, of laborand reflection at once. In other words, the disproportion[Missverhaltniss] between the practice of inquiry and its philosophicalself-understanding occurs in Marx because he interprets the history ofbeing human through labor alone. And Habermas understands bylabor exactly what he wishes to understand, that is, instrumentalaction withoutrevolutionary practice, material activity bereftof

reflection. Already, therefore, Habermass entire meta-critique ofMarx is on shaky ground because he has excogitated for himselfanobstacle, a problem or disproportion in Marxs praxis that Habermas(texts in hand) is about to overcome on his own meta-critical terms that is,philosophisch! That is why we protest, despite our humbleadmiration for him, that Habermas spent his lifetime bridging theory andpractice in theory alone!

For what purpose can it serve to draw a distinction as subtle as it iscasuistic between the Marxian notion of labor and reflection? As wesaw with the Eleventh Thesis, it is true that Marx leaned too heavily on

the dichotomy between the [real, natural] world and its ideological,fetishistic interpretations, and thence invited those hideousHegelian-Marxist (mostly Lukacsian) disquisitions on authenticity andfalse consciousness. But it is or should be wholly evident that whenMarx spoke of labor he never intended by that term to mechanicalpro-duction that the bourgeoisie intends by it in opposition to someother mystical artistic notion of labor such as that contained in theclassical distinction betweenpoiesis and techne. For Marx to have done


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so would have amounted to succumbing to the most risible nostalgia oflate-romantic dreamers hankering (like Lukacs and Heidegger and manyafter them) for the utopia of totality, of artistic and aestheticfulfillment and wholeness for Art.

Habermas has set up a straw man, and then proceeds to punch him outof shape! Exactly in the manner in which thephilosophia perennissince Plato and Aristotle has sought to present the cosmos as an Otherto be subjugated and dominated by the Subject, Man understoodnot immanentlybut rather trans-scendentally, that is to say, byreference to an ideal world or a world of Ideas of which this world,this life are only im-perfect copies mere appearances (blosse Er-scheinungen), phenomena or mere representations (blosse Vor-stellungen). If we define labor in terms of its mechanical a-spect andof its ideal or creative a-spect, then it is obvious that the two are and willremain utterly anti-nomic and ir-reconcilable. It is obvious that we shall

forever sway between crude materialism and refined idealism. Theunbridgeable hiatus this perennial conundrum of the philosophic mind between con-cept and the re-ality that it is supposed to grasp orcom-prehend (as a totality) belongs to the bourgeois fables thatNietzsche laughed off so comprehensively inZarathustra and thatindeed he hammered to smithereens in the Twilight(a book whosesubtitle is how to philosophise with a hammer). (Simply bathetic isthat highbrow bourgeois interpretation, invented by Heidegger, ofNietzsches hammer referring to sounding philosophical thoughts!)

To be sure, it was Heidegger himself who, on the tracks of Lukacss

trenchant critique of The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought (in theGeschichte), sought valiantly in his Kantbuch (which he intended asvolume two ofBeing and Time)to correct Kants misapprehensionsregarding the nature of human intuition into which Kant fell in thesecond edition of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Heidegger genially by-passes Lukacss entire Hegelian problematic of the dialectic of self-consciousness which the Hungarian philosopher had re-worked alongSimmelian lines that led straight into the formal Weberian notion ofrationalization as reification, - which in turn he adapted from Marxsoriginal discussion of the fetishism of commodities in Capital. Thisdualism of theArbeit(labor) as the totality of human objectification

that isparcelised and commodified by the capitalist so that itsqualitative character as use value is then reduced to its quantitativemonetary form as exchange value until a surplus value is producedover and above the socially necessarylabor time needed for thereproduction of society all this is a colossal fiction for which Marxhimself was principally responsible, but one that Lukacs ably worked upinto an even greater mythology, on the tracks of Lenins fancifulBolshevist vanguard or dictatorship (avant-garde?) of the proletariat


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as being the Hegelian carrier (Trager) of the dialectical self-dissolutionof capital (the working class dressed up as the Kapital-Geist), finallyunveiled as the individual subject-object of history (a concept Lukacstook from Schopenhauers critique of Kants formal distinction betweennoumenon andphenomenon).

All along this line of reasoning or analysis, we find a laughable string ofpuerile distinctions between a real world and an apparent worldwhich serves to obfuscate our immediatepractical aim the overthrowof the society of capital (subjective genitive the society created byand for capital) and its final institutional form, the Keynesian State-Formnow on its last desperate death-throes.

Habermassproton pseudon (principal [first and foremost] mistake) hehimself articulates in only his second paragraph (!) from the start of hismeta-critique of Marx. Having quoted from a passage of the Paris

Manuscripts in which Marx decries Hegels confusion of humanobjectification with alienation, Habermas sums up:

This seal placed on absolute knowledge by the philosophy of identity is broken iftheexternality of nature, both objective environmental and subjective bodily nature,not onlyseems external to a consciousness that finds itself within nature but refersinstead to theimmediacy of a substratum on which the mind contingently depends. Here themindpresupposes nature, but in the sense of a natural process that, from within itself,

gives riselikewise to the natural being man and the nature that surrounds him --and not intheidealist sense of a mind that, as Idea existing for itself, posits a natural world asits ownself-created presupposition.4

There are therefore, argues Habermas, both Kantian and non-Kantiancomponents to Marxs philosophical framework. The Kantian elementsare already made explicit in the terminology adopted which, unlikeHegels absolute idealism, still posits the external character ofnature to mind: Here the mind presupposes nature. But

Habermass adoption of terms signifiers, symbols as charged andredolent with the problematic of theprima philosophia, such as mindand nature means that he has already saddled Marxs Entwurf with allthe worthless paralyzing, mortifying ballast and baggage carried byWestern meta-physics what Nietzsche so valiantly de-structed, ordemolished critically and then threw overboard! Just listen to thesepearls from the supreme academic brain of the Teutonic establishment something to make you bristle with rage:


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Marx is assuming something like a nature in itself. It is prior to the world ofmankind. Itis at the root of laboring subjects as natural beings and also enters into theirlaborprocesses. But as the subjective nature of man and the objective nature of their

environment, it is already part of a system of social labor that is divided up intotwoaspects of the same "process of material exchange." While epistemologically wemustpresuppose nature as existing in itself, we ourselves have access to nature onlywithin thehistorical dimension disclosed by labor processes. Here nature in human formmediatesitself with objective nature, the ground and environment of the human world."Nature initself" is therefore an abstraction, which is a requisite of our thought: but wealways

encounter nature within the horizon of the world-historical self-formative processofmankind. Kant's "thing-in-itself" reappears under the name of a naturepreceding humanhistory. (ch.2, p.34)

This is patent and despicable nonsense! Had Marx had the misfortune ofcatching a glimpse of this kind of utter bastardry from academicpoltroons such as Habermas no-one could vouchsafe for thephysicalintegrityof the Frankfurt professor! Nothing but nothing could be furtherfrom Marxs entire worldview, perspective, philosophy call it what youlike! than the garbage about Dinge an sich (things in themselves,

that velame oscuro or obscure veil one could call it letame oscuro,obscure filth!) that Kant unloads by the cart-load in the First Kritik! Theplain and overwhelming fact of the matter is that Marx was attemptingby all means available to him to overcome (Nietzsches Uberwindung)precisely the kind ofmeta-physical conundrums in which preciousbourgeois minds such as Kants took such obvious delight. That Marxwas unable to achieve such a feat we will have to wait until Nietzschefor a far more sophisticated and penetrating effort does not mean thathe shared the trans-scendental idealistclaptrap of Kant and his GermanIdealist epigones!

Quite obviously, having set up a phantasmagoric Kantian anti-thesis inMarxs revolutionary practice between mind and nature, andtherefore between labor and reflection or interaction, it is evidentthat Habermas then needs a syn-thesis (!) an equally phantomaticeffort by Marx to bridge this Fichtean hiatus irrationalis from withinthe Kantian philosophical, speculative strait-jacket in which Habermashas entangled Marxspraxis. Once more, Habermas sees a distortionarising between Marxs practice of inquiry and his philosophical self-


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understanding of this inquiry but this distortion exists only becauseHabermas has fundamentally pre-distorted Marxspraxis by re-defining its central revolutionary problematic! Here is how Habermassummarises his conclusions:

The materialist concept of synthesis thus retains from Kant the fixed frameworkwithinwhich the subject forms a substance that it encounters. This framework isestablishedonce and for all through the equipment of transcendental consciousness or of thehumanspecies as a species of tool-making animals. On the other hand, in distinctionfrom Kant,Marx assumes empirically mediated rules of synthesis that are objectified asproductiveforces and historically transform the subjects' relation to their naturalenvironment.29What is Kantian about Marx's conception of knowledge is the invariant relation of

the species to its natural environment, which is established by the behavioralsystem of instrumental action -- for labor processes are the "perpetual naturalnecessity of human life."

It is quite mesmerizing to witness the effusive impetus with whichHabermas with nonchalant hermeneutic fury completely misrepresentsMarxs most express theoretical intentions. Doubtless, Marx believed ina subject as well as in nature. But why and how are thesenecessarily retained from Kants fixed framework? And where ohwhere is that transcendental consciousness that Habermas claims todetect in Marx? Nothing is transcendental in Marx! Marx is inveterate,

stubborn immanence! Nor can the human species for Marx be describedbarrenly as a species of tool-making animals because, asHabermas remarks in the very next sentence,

in distinction from Kant, Marx assumes empirically mediated rules of synthesisthat are objectified as productive forces and historically transform thesubjects' relation to their natural environment.

But again, why, in light of this historical trans-formation surely ameta-morphosis, a Goethian trans-crescence, and if not, why not? -,why does this entitle Habermas to conclude in the same breath that

[w]hat is Kantian about Marx's conception of knowledge is the invariantrelation of the species to its natural environment?How on earth canthis relation be invariant when Habermas has just acknowledged thatit is liable to historical transformation? And how can this invariancebe established by the behavioral system of instrumental action -- forlabor processes are the perpetual natural necessity of human life? Whydoes the Marxian perpetual natural necessity of human life the


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evident ec-sistence of being human as living activity, hence even asArbeit suddenly become a behavioral system ofinstrumental action?

The conditions of instrumental action arose contingently in the natural evolutionof the human species. At the same time, however, with transcendental necessity,they bind ourknowledge of nature to the interest of possible technical control over naturalprocesses.

The objectivity of the possible objects of experience is constituted within aconceptual perceptual scheme rooted in deep-seated structures of human action;this scheme is equally binding on all subjects that keep alive through labor.

At this point one would have to state bluntly, at the risk of soundingvulgar, that Habermas is making things up on the run such is theobtuseness of his fantastic variations on Marxs theme! Where inGods name does transcendental necessity come into Marxsimmanent naturalism something worthy of Nietzsches genealogy of

morals?

The objectivity of the-- 36 --possible objects of experience is thus grounded in the identity of a naturalsubstratum,namely that of the bodily organization of man, which is oriented toward action,and not inan original unity of apperception, which, according to Kant, guarantees withtranscendental necessity the identity of an a-historical consciousness in general.

Theidentity of societal subjects, in contrast, alters with the scope of their power oftechnical

control. This point of view is fundamentally un-Kantian. The knowledge generatedwithin the framework of instrumental action takes on external existence as aproductiveforce. Consequently both nature, which has been reshaped and civilized in laborprocesses, and the laboring subjects themselves alter in relation to thedevelopment of theproductive forces.

Finally! Finally Habermas snaps out of his neo-Kantian trance! Butremember, this is onlypartlyso only to the extent, that is, that thisun-Kantian point of view merely counterbalances the other Kantianelements of Marxs theory that Habermas seemingly detects. ButHabermas remains locked within his own formulation of the Marxianproblematic which, far from falling back on Kantian formalism, wasalways (remember!?) implanted on Hegels dialectic for a start! Now, ifwe accept Habermass one-sided Kantian formulation of Marxsproblematic, then we necessarily end up with his disproportionbecause, from the quotation just above, if


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[t]he knowledge generated within the framework of instrumental action takes onexternal existence as a productive force,

then it follows necessarilythat for such a framework ofinstrumentalaction to be trans-muted into an external existence as a productiveforce involves a reshaping and civilizing of nature as well as analteration of both nature and the laboring subjects themselves that isquite inevitably anti-thetical that is, it gives rise to Habermasslamented distortion in Marx for the simple reason that natureunderstood as the antithesis of the subject can never betransformed or civilized or altered by.instrumental action!Thus, Habermas in-vents (in the double sense of conjures up and in-venire, runs up against) the disproportion in Marxspraxis that helaments! First, Habermas invents in the sense that he makes theproblem up all by himself, pulls it out of a hat; and then, he in-ventsthis problem in the sense that he claims to have run up against it as adisproportion in Marx!

The materialist concept of synthesis through social labor marks the systematicposition occupied by Marx's conception of [42] the history of mankind in theintellectual current that begins with Kant. In a turn of thought peculiarlydetermined by Fichte, Marx adopts the intention of Hegel's objection to theKantian approach to the critique of knowledge. In so doing he is impervious tothe philosophy of identity, which precludes epistemology as such.Notwithstanding, the philosophical foundation of this materialism proves itselfinsufficient to establish an unconditional phenomenological self-reflection ofknowledge and thus prevent the positivist atrophy of epistemology. Consideredimmanently, I see the reason for this in the reduction of the self- generative actof the human species to labor. (p.42)

So herein lies the problem with Habermass wholly unwarrantedinterpretation of Marxs epistemology: in the fact, that is, thatHabermas entirely overlooks Marxs adoption of Hegels critique of Kant from positions that will be shared in part even by the negativesDenken from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche and Heidegger, and thatindeed had germinated as early as Schelling (see Lowith, Vom Hegel zuNietzsche) and this not merely in terms ofmethod, given Marxs self-avowed indebtedness (cf. Preface to Capital) to Hegelian dialectic, butalso and above all in the fact that the Hegelian dialectic constitutes acritique of Kantian transcendental idealism both as epistemology and

above all as ontology! Kant is almost exclusively concerned (despite thehelpful objections Heidegger raises in the Kantbuch) with epistemology,whereas Hegel is concerned essentially with ontology with the natureof Being despite the fact (and here is the pretext for Marxs critique ofHegel, and then of Political Economy, of Ricardo) that he assimilatesontology to logic, and thence to epistemology. Nevertheless, theHegelian dialectic of self-consciousness is much more than a critique ofKantian epistemology! It is above all else an attempt to move beyond


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Kants epistemological formalism which inevitably shatters against therock of its ontological antinomies!

It is absurd, in light of all this and we need not even consider Hegelhere, for one could as well invoke Schopenhauers own critique of Kant

(!) to insist that Marxs own critique of Hegel would after all was saidand done revert to Kantian positions that Marx himself would haveconsidered well and truly dead and buried after Hegels philosophicaladvances! The weakness, the weak link, if you please (as Marx wouldsay), in Habermass review of Marxianpraxis ( ofinquiryas political andtheoreticalpractice) lies perhaps most centrally and essentially in hismisconception of the Marxian notion of labor, of theArbeit, whichHabermas understands as instrumental action, as mere operari precisely because he theorises the entire complex ontology of the Arbeitfrom a pre-Nietzschean viewpoint! Marx, on the contrary, whilst helacked thephilosophical lexicon developed later by Nietzsche, and more

intensely by Heidegger, had already moved to a philosophical dimensionthat Kant did not even imagine and here the pun is intended because,as Heidegger showed, it is exactly the defective Kantian notion of theimagination as the syn-thesis between human intuition (Sinn) andthe understanding (Verstand) that made his critical idealismvulnerable to the Nietzschean assault.

Here then is how Habermas recapitulates his animadversion on Marxin the second part of his critical review of Marxian praxis, but note thatalreadyhe has turned this praxis into the critique of epistemology:

Marx reduces the process of reflection to the level of instrumentalaction. By reducing the self-positing of the absolute ego to the more tangibleproductive activity of the species, he eliminates reflection as such as a motiveforce of history, even though he retains the framework of the philosophy ofreflection. His re-interpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology betrays theparadoxical consequences of taking Fichte's philosophy of the ego andundermining it with materialism. Here the appropriating subject confronts in thenon-ego not just a product of the ego but rather some portion of the contingencyof nature. In this case the act of appropriation is no longer identical with thereflective reintegration of some previously externalized part of the subject itself.Marx preserves the relation of the subject's prior positing activity (which was nottransparent to itself), that is of hypostatization, to the process of becomingconscious of what has been objectified, that is of reflection. But, on the premisesof a philosophy of labor, this relation turns into the relation of production andappropriation, of externalization and the appropriation of externalized essentialpowers. Marx conceives of reflection according to the model ofproduction. Because he tacitly starts with this premise, it is notinconsistent that he does not distinguish between the logical status ofthe natural sciences and of critique. (p.44)


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Now, as we showed in the first part of this review, it is emphatically notMarx who reduces the process ofreflection to the level ofinstrumentalaction in the first place because Marx neverproperlyunderstoodhuman living activity or living labor in terms of this dichotomy thatHabermas wishes to impose on it between the instrumental side of

human activity and its conscious or reflective side! There wasunquestionablya scientistic and reductive side to Marxs work that takesus down to that most vulgar of his claims that of having uncoveredthe laws of motion of human history or at any rate the economic lawsof motion of modern society on which Habermas predictably lays muchemphasis. Yet, as even Habermas himself concedes, there is much inMarxspractical application of his critique to specific historical events,and most notably his insistence on the historical uniqueness of capitalistsocial relations of production (in contrast to Political Economy), thatdirectly confutes Habermass claim of the Marxian reduction ofreflection to instrumental action and disproportion between his

practice of inquiry and his philosophical self-understanding of it.

Rather than carp on the all-too-easily confutable scientism of Marxsanalysis, Habermas ought to have asked himselfwhy and how it isindeedpossible for Marx to be able simultaneouslyto engage in thevulgar conception of the laws of motion of human history andindeed even to indulge the claim that human history could be subsumedeventually under natural history (the infamous unification of science)! whilst still being able to conceive of the critique of political economyas a form ofrevolutionary practice! The reason why Habermas is unableto pose himself the question is the converse of the reason why Marx was

able to contradict hispraxis: and the reason is that Habermas isillegitimately dissecting human living activity (theArbeitor labor) intoan instrumental or mechanical or, if you like techno-scientificaspect, and into a reflective or conscious or contemplative aspect:in short, he is accepting without hint of a doubt unreflexively indeed! the division of human labor into intellectual and manual labor.(Intellectual and Manual Laboris the title of the major theoretical workby Alfred Sohn-Rethel in which he introduces also the notion of socialsynthesis. This is a gallant effort from a genuinely devoted Marxistrevolutionary thinker whom we hold in high esteem. It is intriguing, tosay the least, that Habermas though most probably aware of Sohn-

Rethels theses fails to acknowledge or even to mention them in hiswork! Our own divergence from the theses of this work will be thesubject of a separate review, but we are happy to adopt themprovisionallyhere.)

To say it again, when Habermas claims that Marx conceives ofreflection according to the model of production, he is illicitly concludingthat production is somehow un-reflexive and mechanical that, in


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other words, it is possible to distinguish between a sphere of necessity,of technical and scientific instrumental action (including that ofeconomic science?) and, in opposition to this, of a reflexive sphereof freedom or ideation that responds to symbolic interaction. In effect,Habermas is reproducing uncriticallythe Cartesian schema ofres

cogitans (mind, soul, spirit) and res extensa (body, matter).Indeed, so pervicaciously ingrained is this philosophical Cartesian-Kantianprejudice in Habermass entire worldview, that he even has theeffrontery to accuse Marx of confusing the logical status of thenatural sciences and of critique (!) when it ought to be amplyevident to him by now if indeed he had read Marx with an open mind that no such distinction can be drawn between the logicalstatus of the natural sciences and ofcritique!

Because he [Marx] tacitly starts with this premise, it is not inconsistent that hedoes not distinguish between the logical status of the natural sciences and ofcritique.

The cardinal sin committed by Habermas here is firstto havearticulated a purely fictitious and wholly phantomaticdistinction between the logic of the natural sciences and thelogic of critique when he should know that there is no logic toeither the natural sciences or indeed to critique (!); and then,Habermas compounds his temerary insolence by accusing Marxof not distinguishing between these two utterly phantomaticentities!

Here Habermas doubtless has in mind Marxs famous statement inCapital about human beings as species-conscious beings theGattungswesen. And again we would have to concede that in this regardas well Marx displays all the scientistic prejudices, even bigotry, of theage of Darwin, to whom he intended to dedicate Capital. Nevertheless,this does not entitle Habermas to saddle Marx with a framework ofphilosophical analysis that the bearded thinker time and againchallenges and even contra-dicts most notably in the Grundrisse. This isnot the place to go into the merits of Marxs explicit and implicit outlineof his philosophical framework, in the Grundrisse and elsewhere; norhave we time and space to trace the historical correspondence between

the division of social laborinto its directive intellectual and itscommanded manual aspects. But we must take time to delineate twofacets of an implicit Marxian critique of epistemology based on areading of Marxs work that draws upon the Nietzschean critique ofWestern values(scientific and ethico-political) which, again, weattribute to thepolitical division of human living activity into intellectuallaboron one side and manual laboron the other.


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Here is a splendid example of Habermass inability to see that scienceand technology and human history can be at one and the same timesubsumed under social relations of production and therefore (!) still besubsumed within a phylogenetic understanding of human being asspecies-conscious being. If indeed, unlike Habermas, we are able to

understand science and technology as products of human socialrelations of production rather than as autonomous, objective entitieswith a neutral logical status, then there is no reason why thedevelopment of these social relations of production in accordance withphylogenetically defined human interests may clash and come intocontra-diction with their actual asset under capitalism! This is not alogical contradiction but what Marx would have called a dialecticalone one that does not require a transcendental understanding ortheory of knowledge that is separate from (that transcends) theactual social relations of production (the satisfaction of human needsand goals) - which is precisely the reason why Habermas champions

Kant against Hegel! -, but rather an immanent one that subsumesscience and technology to those social relations of production.

If we take as our basis the materialist concept of synthesis through social labor,then both the technically exploitable knowledge of the natural sciences, theknowledge of natural laws, as well as the theory of society, the knowledge oflaws of human natural history, belong to the same objective context of the self-constitution of the species.

Simply breath-taking is the mulish obstinacy with which Habermas harpson this opposition that exists only in his mind and in his neo-Kantianmind alone (!) between natural laws and laws of human natural

history (whatever thatmeans!). And immediately following thissentence, just take a look at thispearl (!):

From the level of pragmatic, everyday knowledge to modern natural science, theknowledge of nature derives from man's primary coming to grips withnature; at the same time it reacts back upon the system of social laborand stimulates its development.

The knowledge of society can be viewed analogously. Extending from the level ofthe pragmatic self-understanding of social groups to actual social theory, itdefines the self-consciousness of societal subjects. Their identity is reformed ateach stage of development of the productive forces and is in turn a condition forsteering the process of production.

Thus, out of his own creative imagination, Habermas has conjured up adivision, an opposition, a contrast between the knowledge ofnature and the knowledge of society which leads us back to the oldconfabulations about Subject and Object, Mind and Body, Spirit andNature, and finally but here is the real immanent political contrastthat matters to us: - capitalist and worker, dead objectified labor


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commanding living labor. In vain, Habermas invokes the Marx of theGrundrisse to enlist him in this neo-Kantian folly:

The development of fixed capital indicates the extent to which general social knowledge has become an

immediate force of production, and therefore [!] the conditions of the social life process itself have come

under the control of the general intellect.7

So far as production establishes the only framework in which the genesis andfunction of knowledge can be interpreted, the science of man also appears undercategories of knowledge for control (Verfgungswissen). At the level of the self-consciousness of social subjects, knowledge that makes possible the control ofnatural processes turns into knowledge that makes possible the control of thesocial life process. In the dimension of labor as a process of production andappropriation, reflective knowledge (Reflexionswissen) changes into productiveknowledge (Produktionswissen). Natural knowledge congealed in technologiesimpels the social subject to an ever more thorough knowledge of its "process ofmaterial exchange" with nature. In the end this knowledge is transformed intothe steering of social processes in a manner not unlike that in which natural

science becomes the power of technical control. (p.47)

Marx himself, in the quotation Habermas adopts above, commits thevery vulgar error one that Habermas, entirely innocentof economicknowledge, fails to detect of confusing what he will later (in Capital)call constant capital with fixed capital (plant and equipment roughly put, technology). But this does not entitle Habermas toconclude that by fixed capital Marx means mere instrumentaltechnology or knowledge for control (my God! Where does he getthese notions from?) or Verfugungswissen which can then becombined with reflective knowledge to yield finally in a

transmutation worthy of the maddest mediaeval alchemist a magicalproductive knowledge or Produktionswissen (I give up!) that,according to Habermas, Marx does not self-understandphilosophically!

At this stage of arcane nonsense we would be quite entitled to throw thewhole physical weight of the book Knowledge and Human Interests atHabermas himself were it not for the fact that we owe him the stimulusof his comprehensive obtuse asininity - and, let us admit it, a great dealof intellect in the mix, for which we thank him! Again and again,Habermas goes on (as if repetition could somehow dispel his confusion)

to cavil at this dualism of labor (Arbeit) as mere instrumentalaction (manual labor?) and labor as reflection or interaction(intellectual labor?):

Here it is from the methodological perspective that we are interested in thisconception of the transformation of the labor process into a scientific processthat would bring man's "material exchange" with nature under the control of ahuman species totally emancipated from necessary labor. A science of man
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developed from this point of view would have to construct the history of thespecies as a synthesis through social labor-- and only through labor. It wouldmake true the fiction of the early Marx that natural science subsumes thescience of man just as much as the latter subsumes the former. For, onthe one hand, the scientization of production is seen as the movement thatbrings about the identity of a subject that knows the social life process and then

also steers it. In this sense the science of man would be subsumed under naturalscience. On the other hand, the natural sciences are comprehended in virtue oftheir function in the self- generative process of the species as the exotericdisclosure of man's essential powers. In this sense, natural science would besubsumed under the science of man. The latter contains principles from which amethodology of the natural sciences resembling a transcendental-logicallydetermined pragmatism could be derived. But this science does not question itsown epistemological foundations. It understands itself in analogy to the naturalsciences as productive knowledge. It thus conceals the dimension of self-reflection in which it must move regardless.

Now the argument which we have taken up was not pursued beyond the stage of

the "rough sketch" ("Rohentwurf") of Capital. It is typical only of the philosophicalfoundation of

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Marx's critique of Hegel, that is production as the "activity" of a self-constitutingspecies. It is not typical of the actual social theory in which Marx materialisticallyappropriates Hegel on a broad scale. Even in the Grundrisse we find alreadythe official view that the transformation of science into machinery doesnot by any means lead of itself to the liberation of a self-consciousgeneral subject that masters the process of production. According tothis other version the self-constitution of the species takes place notonly in the context ofmen's instrumental action upon nature butsimultaneously in the dimension ofpower relations that regulate men'sinteraction among themselves.

This is complete and utter nonsense because nowhere in theGrundrisse (the Roh-entwurf) will we find Marx indulging in the kind ofacademic hair-splitting exercises on which Habermas built his academiccareer between labor as instrumental action upon nature andlabor as interaction between human beings least of all would Marxhave countenanced the simultaneous occurrence of these twofictions of Habermass own making. And that is because Marx knew alltoo well that acquiescing in such a dualism or dichotomybetween

instrumental action on one side and interaction on the other wouldhave landed him straight into the Comteanpositivism indeed thenihilism, as Nietzsche so ably unmasked it in Gaya Scienza and in theGenealogie for the very simple reason that once we admit thathuman living activity is subject to the laws of nature, then itfollows just as scientifically that the interaction betweenhuman beings also is subject to these laws of nature (or


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technology) which is exactly what every Positivism fromComte onwards has tried to establish!

So this turns into complete and utter nonsense Habermass absurd claimthat Marx was somehow responsible for the intellectual emergence of

Comtean positivism (yes, I know, it is hard to believe, but this is exactlywhat Habermas does!) as Habermas almost insanely, but assuredlyinanely, suggests!

Marx did not develop this idea of the science of man. By equatingcritique with natural science, he disavowed it. Materialist scientism onlyreconfirms what absolute idealism had already accomplished: the elimination ofepistemology in favor of unchained universal "scientific knowledge"--but this timeof scientific materialism instead of absolute knowledge.

With his positivist demand for a natural science of the social, Comte merelyneeded to take Marx, or at least the intention that Marx believed himself to be

pursuing, at his word. Positivism turned its back to the theory of knowledge,whose philosophical self-liquidation had been carried on by Hegel and Marx, whowere of one mind in this regard. In so doing, positivism regressed behind thelevel of reflection once attained by Kant. In continuity with pre-critical traditions,however, it successfully set about the task, which epistemology had abandonedand from which Hegel and Marx believed themselves exempted, of elaborating amethodology of the sciences.

Wrong! It is Habermass attempt to rescue natural sciencefrom thepractical critique of Marxian theorythat deliversHabermas straight into the paws and maws and jaws ofPositivism which he himself confirms when he foolishly and absurdly

concedes with the last words of his essay that positivism

successfully set about the task, which epistemology had abandoned and fromwhich Hegel and Marx believed themselves exempted, of elaborating amethodology of the sciences. (p.63)

Successfully? Really? Yet to the degree thatpositivistmethodology issuccessful, it is so not because it is scientific but rather because itsstrategy of domination on behalf of capital against living labor iseffectual! Habermas again confuses what is with what succeeds,which is the very opposite of what the task of critique and reflection

is supposed to do! Perhaps the singular source of Habermass confusionis the fact that he wishes to outline, if not even to spell out, a positivescience that, as the English title to this chapter suggests, will serveboth as theory of knowledge and as social theory. So distant isHabermas from comprehending the most basic outline of the Marxiancritique of political economy that he confuses Marxs identification of thesocial antagonism intrinsic to the technological means and mode ofproduction adopted by capitalists to subjugate living labor and reduce it


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to abstract laborwith a simple squabble between social classes overthe distribution of the surplus product created by labor. By labor! Sovulgar is Habermass reading of Marx that he cannot even distinguishbetween living labor and labor power, so that the entire problemwith capitalism boils down for him to one about the distribution of

surplus product over and above what Marx unhappily called necessarylabor another fable attributable to his pervasive scientism!

If production attains the level of producing goods over and above elementaryneeds, the problem arises of distributing the surplus product created by labor.

This problem is solved by the formation of social classes, which participate tovarying degrees in the burdens of production and in social rewards. With thecleavage of the social system into classes that are made permanent by theinstitutional framework, the social subject loses its unity: "To regard society asone single subject is, moreover, to regard it falsely--speculatively."15

As long as we regard the self-constitution of the species through labor only with

respect to the power of control over natural processes that accumulates in theforces of production, it is meaningful to speak of the social system in general andto speak of the social subject in the singular. For the level of development of theforces of production determines the system of social labor as a whole. In principlethe members of a society all live at the same level of mastery of nature, which ineach case is given with the available technical knowledge. So far as the identityof a society takes form via this level of scientific-technical progress, it is the self-consciousness of "the" social subject. But as we now see, the self-formativeprocess of the species does not coincide with the genesis of this subject ofscientific-technical progress. Rather, this "self-generative act," which Marxcomprehended as a materialistic activity, is accompanied by a self-formativeprocess mediated by the interaction of class subjects either under compulsoryintegration or in open rivalry. (p.54)

Habermass difficulty is that he conceives of the process of productionas a scientifically and technically neutral process one that respondsto natural laws. As a result, Habermas then needs to add to thisprocess as an adjunct or appendage a social theory that can explainwhy and how, given that the process of production is scientifically andtechnologically neutral(!), there can ever arise any social divisionsin society over the distribution of the product between socialclasses! What Habermas neglects entirely is that science andtechnology are neverneutral but rather are tools, instruments andstrategies of capitalist domination over living labor. The aim of ourrevolutionary movement can never be that of developing a neutralscience. Rather, it is that of creating a democratic society!

******

Marxs inability to determine value and prices independently of themarket mechanism induced him to seek the objectification of value
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in the fetishism of commodities which served the same purpose asWebers rationalization that of measuring the social synthesis,which is what Lukacs translated into the concept of reification. Just aswith Webers rationalization, the Marxian concept of commodityfetishism or the Lukacsian equivalent of reification simply cannot

account for the social synthesis. Marx and Lukacs understand that ifthis social synthesis is objectively valid if, in other words, it ispossible to measure value independently of political institutions, ofviolence -, then capitalism would be made scientifically legitimate andthe only objection to it would rest with its efficiency as a mode ofproduction of social wealth. If, on the contrary, this social synthesis isachieved through a necessary illusion (fetishism of commodities,reification, formalism), then we have a contradiction because noillusion, let alone a necessary fiction, which is an oxymoron! - cankeep a social system in reproduction! (We dealt before with Lukacssdescription of reification as necessary illusion which is an oxymoron

because illusions cannot be necessary and necessity cannot beillusory.)

Lukacs perceives this problem when he asserts, albeit still from theviewpoint of the opposition of fragmented alienated labor against the(lost!) totalityof artisanal labor, that the limit to reification is itsformalism (in HCC, p.101). Habermas understands Lukacss statementto mean that workers are aware that the reification of labor time isan illusion, however necessary it may be objectively and thattherefore the bourgeoisie cannot be the individual subject-object ofhistory. As if history required anything like individual subject-

objects for exploitation to occur! (Nietzsche would have a fit if he everread Lukacs!) Quite obviously, Lukacss analysis does not deal with theproblem because, as Habermas rightly notes, this formalism can beovercome only philosophically through class consciousness, whichentails opposing one illusion with another, because it is hard to seehow the necessary illusion of reification could ever become un-necessary! (The old Frankfurt School realized this, only to preserve theidolatry of [Instrumental] Reason). [See Habermas, Theory ofCommunicative Action, Vol.1.]

The only way to lend validity to Lukacss position is to reflect that the

formalism of reification, of the mythical law of value, will defeatcapitalism for the precise reason that what makes itpossible is a realityof antagonism, of capitalist command over living labor that ensuresthe abstraction of living labor. In other words, there is no real ornecessary illusion behind reification but the naked blunt violence ofthe capitalist the regular discipline of the factory. This is whyformalism is the limit of capitalism: - because rationalization is notan objective (Weber) or merely ideological (Marx-Lukacs, then


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Heidegger-Marcuse) phenomenon, but rather (with Nietzschesinvariance, the unreality of values) an arbitrary one that responds toa strategyof command and exploitation.

Lukacs does in fact, at the page reference cited by Habermas, seem to

indicate formalism as the internal limit of the wage relation in terms ofthe fact that the market mechanism metamorphoses living labor into athing but only formally, only abstractly not in reality ornecessarily and must therefore succumb to the reality of classantagonism! It is true that both Marx and Lukacs ultimately fall into thisvicious circle of market competition leading to abstract labor andthen to value as a necessary illusion an operation that isimpossible because competition cannot automaticallyturn livingexperience into a thing. Habermas, however, completely fails to seethat this is the real political problem and engages instead in a critique ofLukacs on the ground that the reality of reification (which Lukacs has

rendered identical with Weberian rationalization because of hiserroneous acceptance of market competition) cannot be dispelledby a mythical class consciousness! By so doing, Habermasdemonstrates how little he has understood where the actual problemwith the wage relation and with Lukacss concept of reification (andMarxs fetishism) really lies: - that is to say, in the impossibilityofreification or fetishism as a necessary illusion! Certainly notinLukacss residual Hegelian idealistic objectivism!

The oxymoron of necessary illusion to describe the fetishism of thecommodity and reification is the mirror-image of the Marxian notion

of historical materialism: on one side the phenomenon of value is anillusion, that is, it is a subjective product of human history, whilst onthe other side it is necessary because it exemplifies the objective andmaterial economic laws of motion of society. Because Habermasaccepts the scientific basis of historial materialism based on themistaken distinction he draws between instrumental action andinteraction or reflection, he can then accept this oxymoron asindicating the historical necessity of the commodity form at a givenstage of the natural history of society! Here is the proof in his ownwords:

Marx did not adopt an epistemological perspective in developing his conceptionof the history of the species as something that has to be comprehendedmaterialistically. Nevertheless, if social practice does not only accumulate thesuccesses of instrumental action but also, through class antagonism, producesand reflects on objective illusion, then, as part of this process, the analysis ofhistory is possible only in a phenomenologically mediated (gebrochen) mode ofthought. The science of man itself is critique and must remain so. (K&HI, ch.3,p.62)


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What this reveals, of course, is the ingrained transcendentalobjectivism derived mainly from Neo-Kantian sources, chieflySimmels social forms that afflicts Habermass own analyticalframework! Here is Habermas again:

To the degree that the commodity form becomes the form of objectivityand rules the relations of individuals to one another as well as their dealings withexternal nature and with internal subjective nature, the lifeworld has to becomereified and individuals degraded as systems theory foresees into anenvironment for a society that has become external to them, that hasconsolidated for them into an opaque system, that has been abstracted fromthem and become independent of them. Lukacs shares this perspective withWeber as with Horkheimer; but he is convinced that this development not onlycan be stopped practically, but, for reasons that can be theoreticallydemonstrated, has to run up against internal limits: This rationalization of theworld appears to be complete, it seems to penetrate to the very depths of mansphysical and psychic nature; but it finds its limit in the formal character of its ownrationality. [HCC, p.101]

The burden of proof that Marx wanted to discharge in politico-economic terms,with a theory of crisis, now falls upon a demonstration of the immanent limits torationalization, a demonstration that has to be carried out in philosophicalterms, (Habermas, TCA, Vol1, p.361).

Again, Habermas is wrong because the context in which Lukacsdiscusses this limit to rationalization is precisely that of Marxs theoryofcapitalist crisis induced both by antagonism in the labor process andby inter-capitalist competition in the market! As a matter of fact, onp.102, very shortly after the passage cited by Habermas, Lukacs goes onto cite Marx on this very point!

Division of labor within the workshop implies the undisputed authority of thecapitalist over men, who are but parts of a mechanism that belongs to him. Thedivision of labor within society brings into contact independent commodityproducers who acknowledge no other authority than that ofcompetition, ofthecoercion exerted by the pressure of their mutual interests, (Marx, Capital III,quoted in Lukacs, HCC, p.102.)

Of course, neither Marx nor Lukacs will ever succeed in showing howthe market mechanism can function, how competition betweencapitalists can everprovide the social synthesis for the reproduction of

capitalist society in any form whatsoever, least of all that of value! Forthis reason, they rely on the notions of fetishism and reification,respectively, to provide the foundation for that comprehensiveirrationality constituted by the capitalist wage relation which is whyLukacs can then fall prey to and swallow wholesale the formalrationality of a Weber, albeit to denounce its formal limits! It is muchsimpler for us, instead, to attribute the social synthesis of the society ofcapital to the sheer violence of the wage relation, imposed through a


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network of capitalist political and social institutions all of which answerultimately to the stability of money-wages and the price and monetarysystem. But this does not mean that Habermas has identified this realapory in Marxs and Lukacss theories the aporetic notion of laborvalue as the foundation of the social synthesis of capitalist reproduction

through market competition! And this failure, we argue, is a direct resultof Habermass persistent wrong focus on the philosophical, idealisticand Neo-Kantian theorization of the whole quaestio of reason andrationalization as a discrepancy (Missverhaltnis) between laws ofnature or epistemology and laws of society or social theory, ratherthan on thepolitical antagonism of the wage relation!

Habermas is entirely right to chide Lukacss idealistic reconciliation oftheory and practice in the class consciousness of the individualsubject-object of history, namely the proletariat (p.364). But hecompletely misses the pointthat the contra-diction in capitalist social

relations is not predominantly one that concerns communicative actionor competence! Instead, it is one that is intrinsic to thepolitics of thewage relation itself! Perhaps the worst that can be said of Habermassmeta-critique of Marx and Lukacs is that his own notion ofcommunicative action remains trapped in the voluntarism ofconsciousness, of morality and aestheticism:

It is characteristic of the pattern of rationalization in capitalist societies that thecomplex of cognitive-instrumental rationality establishes itself at the cost ofpractical rationality; communicative relations are reified. Thus it makes sense toask whether the critique of the incomplete character of the rationalization thatappears as reification does not suggest taking a complementary relation

between cognitive-instrumental rationality, on the one hand, and moral-practicaland aesthetic-practical rationality, on the other, as a standard that is inherent inthe unabridged concept of practice, that is to say in communicative [p.364]action itself, (TCA, Vol.1, pp.363-4).

8888

For Marx, the phenomenological exposition of consciousness in itsmanifestations, which served Hegel only as an introduction to scientificknowledge, becomes the frame of reference in which the analysis of the historyof the species stays confined. Marx did not adopt an epistemological perspectivein developing his conception of the history of the species as something that has


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to be comprehended materialistically. Nevertheless, if social practice does notonly accumulate the successes of instrumental action but also, through classantagonism, produces and reflects on objective illusion, then, as part of thisprocess, the analysis of history is possible only in a phenomenologicallymediated (gebrochen) mode of thought. The science of man itself is critique andmust remain so. For after arriving at the concept of synthesis through a

reconstruction of the course of consciousness in its manifestations, there is onlyone condition under which critical consciousness could adopt a perspective thatallowed disengaging social theory from the epistemological mediation ofphenomenological self-reflection: that is if critical consciousness could apprehendand understand itself as absolute synthesis. As it is, however, social theoryremains embedded in the framework of phenomenology, while the latter, undermaterialist presuppositions, assumes the form of the critique of ideology.

If Marx had reflected on the methodological presuppositions of social theory ashe sketched it out and not overlaid it with a philosophical self-understandingrestricted to the categorial framework of production, the difference betweenrigorous empirical science and critique would not have been concealed. If Marx

had not thrown together interaction and work under the label of social practice(Praxis), and had he instead related the materialist concept of synthesis likewiseto the accomplishments of instrumental action and the nexuses ofcommunicative action, then the idea of a science of man would not have beenobscured by identification with natural science. Rather, this idea would havetaken up Hegel's critique of the subjectivism of Kant's epistemology andsurpassed it materialistically. It would have made clear that ultimately a radicalcritique of knowledge can be carried out only in the form of a reconstruction ofthe history of the

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species, and that conversely social theory, from the viewpoint of the self-constitution of the species in the medium of social labor and class struggle, ispossible only as the self-reflection of the knowing subject.

Habermas's Met a Critique of Marx

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