Jürgen Habermas’s project of a reformulation of critical social theory was from the very beginning characterized by a confrontation with Marx and the Marxist tradition. In particular, their concepts of labor, production, and social...
moreJürgen Habermas’s project of a reformulation of critical social theory was from the very beginning characterized by a confrontation with Marx and the Marxist tradition. In particular, their concepts of labor, production, and social synthesis repeatedly gained Habermas’s attention and became objects of his critique. The rejection of what later came to be called the “production paradigm” occurred at three levels: in terms of social theory, Habermas doubts that a sufficient concept of social unity can be obtained through the concept of labor; in terms of social philosophy, Habermas complains about the meager normative potential of the concept of labor; and sociologically, the relevance of labor as a leading category in the epoch of late capitalism is called into question. In the following, I wish to concentrate upon the dimension of social theory.
Since Knowledge and Human Interests, and culminating in his critique of the production paradigm in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Habermas attributes to Marx a model of social synthesis through “labor.” Habermas’s critique is that the limitation of the concept of praxis to labor in the sense of “the making of products”1 or the “metabolic process between society and nature”2 brings the problem of reducing “rules of social interaction” to “technical and utilitarian rules for production and employing products.”3 If, however, Marxist theorists decide to distinguish between these dimensions, then according to Habermas they necessarily depart from the categorical framework of the production paradigm. Thus, “labor” for Habermas can only be understood according to the model of a non-social, technical–manipulative relationship to an object. Accordingly, “the production paradigm is fit solely for the explanation of labor and not for that of interaction,”4 i.e., praxis in this sense “has structure-forming effects only for the metabolic process between human beings and nature.”.5 In contrast, according to Habermas’s two-leveled concept, society appears
on the one hand, as a process of production and appropriation, which proceeds in accord with technical-utilitarian rules and signals the relevant level of exchange between society and nature (that is, the state of the forces of production); and on the other hand, as a process of interaction, which is regulated by social norms and brings about a selective access to power and wealth (that is, expresses the relations of production).6
That “practice in the sense of norm-governed interaction cannot be analyzed on the model of the productive expenditure of labor power and the consumption of use-values”7 is an understandable statement. However, the question arises as to whether such a reductionism is actually developed in Marx’s critic of political economy. In the following, I will demonstrate that Habermas, through his approach to Marx, which proceeds on the basis of Marx’s early writings, does not perceive changes to social-theoretical categories in the course of the development of Marx’s work. This applies above all to the form-analytical distinction between abstract and concrete labor, which is first fully developed in Capital.8
The core problem of Habermas’s social theory will prove to be that with the replacement of the concept of “relation of production” through that of the “institutional framework” or “interaction” on one hand and the “subsystem of rational-purposive behavior” on the other hand, the innovative content of the critique of political economy’s concept of society is missed, thus transforming social theory into an external combination of symbolic-interactionist reductionism and systems-theoretical affirmation of social alienation. Society is dissolved into the dualisms of labor and interaction, technics and ethics, human being–thing, and human being–human being relations. Habermas thereby consummates a separation of the class relation from its objective mediation, i.e., from its economic character in the narrow sense, and also trivializes autonomous economic mechanisms to media of communication that disburden activity with the goal of augmenting nature and an optimal material reproduction.
