Jurgen Habermas' Critique of Marxism - Flood

9/4/2014 Anthony Flood "Jürgen Habermas’ Critique of Marxism"

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From Science & Society, XLI:4, Winter 1977-1978,448-64. This 30-year-old essay records not only thebeginning of the end of my Marxism, but also anincipient conviction, then a mere suspicion, that theone mistake a philosophy ought to avoid is to makeproblematic the very existence of philosophy. But, inmy view, that is what any materialism does. Thispaper, with its many infelicities, was one of the firston its topic. (See the editorial note that follows thisessay.)

Jürgen Habermas's Critiqueof Marxism

Anthony Flood

Jürgen Habermas’s assessment of Marxismconsists of both a defense and a critique. Accordingto Habermas, Marx held the key to incorporating theGerman idealistic philosophical tradition into hiscritique of Hegel’s philosophy of subject-objectidentity, but failed to use it fully.

In Habermas’s view, Marx only partially resistedpositivistic social theory’s attack upon epistemologyand consequently adopted a framework ofsociological inquiry that actually prevents criticalself-reflection, the methodological foundation of thetheoretical recognition of the human interests inidentity, control over nature, and emancipation.

In spite of Marx’s obvious concern for the self-emancipation of the human species, his naturalistictheoretical framework, Habermas contends, cannotarticulate that freedom’s realization except as theautomatic by-product of natural-historic evolution.

We shall here examine Habermas’s theory of“cognitive interests” insofar as it determines hiscritique of Marxism, to which critique we shall thenturn. I hope to show that Habermas’s view ofMarxism is a sympathetically critical one fromMarxists should learn, even as they attempt toanswer it.

I

Habermas’s critique, which is founded upon anotion of reflectively grasped cognitive interests,avoids the “circle” of every epistemologicalenterprise while simultaneously making necessary a“materialization” of epistemology. This “circle” ofepistemology may be understood in the followingway.

Consider that for any proposition p and aparticular epistemological criterion c, one may claim

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particular epistemological criterion c, one may claimthat “I know p by appeal to c.” The problem is todetermine what criterion one appeals to when p = c. Clearly, c is eliminated as a possibility since in thiscase its own truth happens to be in question; on theother hand, any metacriterion, for example c’, sharesthe same difficulty as c. The application of a criterionof truth to itself is circular and consequentlymeaningless, while any termination of thetheoretically endless series of “criteria of criteria” isjust as irrational.

This is the substance of Hegel’s criticism of theepistemological enterprise whose most famouspractitioner was Immanuel Kant. The wholejustification-framework must be abandoned aswrong-headed as well as theoretically impossible,for, as Habermas quotes Hegel, what “is demandedis thus the following: we should know the cognitivefaculty before we know. It is like wanting to swimbefore going in the water. The investigation of thefaculty of knowledge is itself knowledge and cannotarrive at its goal because it is this goal already.”[1]

For Hegel, phenomenological self-reflectionaccomplishes what epistemology hopes to, butcannot, bring to pass: the establishment of thefoundation of knowledge as certain, that is,invulnerable to the attacks of unconditional doubt. Since the removal of such doubt is a proce4ssinternal to the thinking subject, that process cannotbe completed via non-subjective argumentation. If acriterion does remove doubt, then it is already onewith the certain knowledge that is sought; therefore,it is meaningless to refer to it as a criterion, as if todistinguish its existence from its object, theunassailable foundation of knowledge.

What is this reflection, then? It is essentially aremembering of knowledge already in one’s ownpossession. To go through the motions of erecting ajustification external to a given knowledge-claim andthen to “apply” it to that claim so as to “verify” thelatter is to engage in self-deception. All one needs todo is to note the immediacy of the knowledge one isunnecessarily trying to justify. Reflection uncoversthis immediacy and recognizes it as the foundationsought.

This foundation of science, which one canimmediately grasp through phenomenological self-reflection, is for Hegel the principle of subject-objectidentity. This identity, or Absolute Knowledge, is atruth unrecognized by us in our everyday

consciousness. In the Phenomenology of Spirit,Hegel tries to demonstrate that this identity ishidden under layers of consciousness which can bephenomenologically penetrated, starting with thepseudo-”immediacy” of Sense-Certainty.

Our purpose here is not to travel thePhenomenology’s tortuous path from thispseudo-”immediacy” to true, subject-objectimmediacy, even if we were capable of doing so. Wemust instead focus on Habermas’s retention ofHegel’s concept of self-reflection along with hisrejection of Hegel’s philosophy of identity. ForHabermas, self-reflection uncovers knowledge-constitutive interests which inhere in Reason andwhich are more fruitfully articulated within theframework of a social theory than in that of anabsolute idealism.

Habermas accepts Hegel’s critique of



Habermas accepts Hegel’s critique ofepistemology without fully accepting what Hegeloffers as a solution, just as he accepts Marx’scritique of Hegel with fully accepting Marx’ssociological framework. According to Habermas,Hegel never really demonstrates subject-objectidentity in his famous work, but rather assumes itspossibility beforehand and then contrives a literarypath which “leads” one to its (pre)destination. Thisundercuts the force of Hegel’s argument and compelsus to look elsewhere for the foundations of a critical,non-positivistic social theory.[2]

Habermas’s materialism is affirmed in hiscriticism of Hegel’s conception of nature as thealienation of Logic, which alienation is overcome inself-conscious Spirit which recognizes nothingoutside itself. As Habermas writes (concurring withMarx):

Nature cannot be conceived asthe other of a mind that is at thesame time in its own element. For if nature were mind in thestate of completeexternalization, then ascongealed mind it would have itsessence and life not in itself butoutside itself. There would be anadvance guarantee that in truthnature could exist only as mindreflexively remembers it whilereturning to itself from nature.[3]

For Habermas, as for Marx, this proposition isintolerably false: nature does not owe its existenceto any stage in the development of Spirit. Spirit andmind are always human spirit and mind, and insofaras humanity has a natural origin, nature mustprecede mind—logically as well as chronologically—as mind’s “absolutely ground.”[4] Thus, “the sealplaced on absolute knowledge by the philosophy ofidentity is broken if the externality of nature . . . notonly seems external to a consciousness that finds

itself within nature but refers instead to theimmediacy of a substratum on which the mindscontingently depends.”[5]

Thus Habermas has difficulties with both ends ofthe spectrum from Kant to Hegel. But as we shallsee, the insights gained from his study of Kant,Fichte, and Hegel lead Habermas to the conclusionthat Marx failed to present enough of the sociologicalpicture: according to Habermas, Marx overreacted toHegel’s dialectics of interaction, even though thelatter are themselves the product of a philosophicalone-sidedness and are embedded in an idealismrejected by both Marx and Habermas. In Habermas’sview, Marx contributed an indispensable—perhapsthe more important part—of the picture through hisdialectics of labor, and for this we owe him much. But insofar as Marx presented his partial truth as thewhole truth, it must be corrected to account for afeature of human existence which claims a statusequal t that of labor. We shall return to Habermas’scriticism of Marx after examining the former’scategories of knowledge-constitutive interests.

By “interests,” Habermas means “the basicorientations rooted in specific fundamentalconditions of the possible reproduction and self-constitution of the human species, namely work andinteraction . . . . Knowledge-constitutive interest canbe described exclusively as a function of the



be described exclusively as a function of theobjectively constituted problems of the preservationof life that have been solved by the cultural forms ofexistence as such.”[6] Already we may note thatHabermas has not one but two categoriesarticulating conditions of human existence, namely,“reproduction and self-constitution,” which respec-tively are referred to by “work and interaction.”

In this view, knowing does not occur outside thecontext of society: knowledge is constituted by theinterests that are generated by the above-mentioned “fundamental conditions” of humanexistence. Human beings have two basicorientations that determine their survival anddevelopment, on e toward nature and anothertoward each other. While these two orientations orinterest are internally related to each other, andthough the activities each generates together form aunity in what Habermas calls “material synthesis,”they must remain distinguishable at the level ofsocio-historical investigation. A closer look at thesetwo interest in now in order.

The technical cognitive interest (TCI) may bereferred to as the interest in control over naturalprocesses. The relationship of man to nature islogically invariant and is well-articulated in thedictum of Francis Bacon that nature, to becommanded, but first be obeyed. The human speciesempirically accumulates and rationally organizesinformation into laws from which can be derivedtechnical rules whose employment extends humancontrol over nature.

TCI’s operate in what Habermas calls systems ofpurposive-rational (instrumental and strategic)action (PRAS’s). The man-nature relationship isessentially a means-end affair in which nature istransformed instrumentally, i.e., to realize certainhuman ends. Human beings approach their naturalenvironment monologically: nature is not“consulted” about what is done to it or said about it. The TCI is also referred to by Habermas as theKantian moment of material synthesis.

The practical cognitive interest (PCI) may bereferred to as the interest in identity. Human beingsdo not simply relate to nature: they must relate toeach other in a definite fashion. They have aconception of themselves that they retain in theirpractical conduct and which partially determines thisconduct, i.e., what is undertaken in PRAS’s. Humanbeings expect certain behavior from each other, notjust from nature. These mutual expectations arearticulated in intersubjectively shared ordinarylanguage in the form of social norms which governwhat Habermas calls symbolic (communicative)interaction systems (SIS’s). These systems refer tothe various ways human beings practically organizethemselves to achieve social ends.

The self-conception of the social subjectsdetermines how they deal with nature, their object. In organizing themselves, human beings becometheir own objects; but owing to their subjectivity,they cannot really treat themselves like theobjectified processes of nature. In other words,while PRAS’s entail a subject-object relation that ismonologic in character, SIS’s entail a subject-objectrelation that is really a subject-subject relation whichis necessarily dialogic in nature: the “object” (really,human subjects) has a say about is done to “it” orsaid about “it”; if it does not have such a say the



said about “it”; if it does not have such a say thesubject matter has been entirely misunderstood. Insofar as SIS’s do not involve a deference to theobject (as in PRAS’s), but rather a positing of thesubject itself, Habermas refers to the PCI as theFichtean moment of material synthesis.

The TCI and the PCI form a dialectical unity inmaterial synthesis which as a whole is guided by themore general human interest in autonomy andresponsibility, or in a word, freedom. This interest inovercoming domination by both nature and by fellowhuman beings underlies PRAS’s and SIS’s, while eachof these systems is guided by its own cognitiveinterest. This overarching knowledge-constitutiveinterest is what Habermas calls the emancipatorycognitive interest (abbreviated hereafter as ECI); itis the Hegelian moment unifying the other two. TheECI is the life-line of Reason: Reason inheres in theinterest in freedom.[7] Reason “lives” in thereflexive remembering which draws out thetranscendental aspects of human existence (the TCIand the PCI). To quote Habermas:

[In] the experience of the

emancipatory power ofreflection, . . . the subject . . .becomes transparent to itself inthe history of its genesis. Methodically it leads to astandpoint from which theidentity of reason with the will toreason freely arises. In self-reflection, knowledge for thesake of knowledge comes tocoincide with the interest inautonomy and responsibility. Forthe pursuit of reflection knowsitself as a moment ofemancipation. Reason is at thesame time subject to the interestin reason. We can say that itobeys an emancipatory cognitiveinterest, which aims at thepursuit of reflection.[8]

Freedom is both striven for and known: it isneither effortlessly nor unconsciously acquired andenjoyed. Freedom as a condition of human existencemarked by autonomy and responsibility is a goalwhich is at once an object of theory and practice. The interest in freedom is thus an inseverable bondof theory and practice.

Habermas takes these explicitly Hegelian themesof freedom and reason very seriously, but securesthem within a materialistic critique of Hegel’sphilosophy of subject-object identity and of Hegel’stheoretical treatment of nature as the alienation ofmind. While Marx, Habermas acknowledges, was thefirst to provide the basis of a non-idealistic renderingof Hegel’s insights into social reality, Marxunfortunately overreacted to Hegel’s dialectics of theinteraction between consciousnesses.

In Habermas’s view, Marx, in his justifiedrejection of Hegel’s absolute idealism, nonethelesscut himself off from what must be preserved, even iftransformed. He replaced one one-sidedness withanother: he attempted to let man’s invariant relationto nature, rather than intersubjective interaction, tellthe whole story. Habermas believes we mustreassess Marx’s contributions to identify and criticizethose elements in his writings which have given rise



those elements in his writings which have given riseto positivistic misinterpretations of his more

dialectical intentions.

II

In his essay, “Labor and Interaction: Remarks onHegel’s Jena Philosophy of Mind,”[9] Habermasargues that Hegel once held labor to be aconstitutive moment of developing Spirit along withlanguage and interaction (action based on mutualexpectation), but later abandoned this perspective.From about the time he wrote the Phenomenology(1806) until his death, Hegel maintained a

philosophy of Spirit which subordinated language to amediation of imagination and memory within“subjective spirit,” while labor as instrumental actiondisappears entirely. Social labor is dealt with underthe rubric “systems of needs” within “objectivespirit,” which is manifested in the realm of law andpolitics.[10]

But because of the truth of a propositionrecognized in his earlier system, namely (asHabermas puts it), that “[i]nstrumental action, atleast when solitary, is monologic action,”[11] Hegellater faced the difficulty of expressing such actionwithin his philosophy of universal interaction. Laboras social labor, as need-satisfaction, as a system ofintersubjective cooperation, fits easily within such aphilosophy; but this is simply not true for labor asinstrumental action, as a relation between subjectand a non-subject (nature). As Marx wrote, theexternality of nature was for Hegel “an alienation, afault, a weakness that should not exist.”[12] Hegelattempted to “eliminate” this weakness byconceiving nature not merely as object(Gegenstand), but as adversary (Gegenspieler) aswell.

Instrumental activity upon nature is not aproblem if nature is not an externality at all, but analienation. Alienation can occur only within and for aconsciousness which merely appears to itself assomething external to itself. In Hegel’s Encyclopediaof the Philosophical Sciences, sec. 384, Habermasfinds that the “manifesting which . . . is the becomingof nature, as the manifesting of spirit, which is free[in history], is the positing of nature as the spirit’sworld; a positing which as reflection is at the sametime a prepositing of the world as independentnature.”[13]

We may recall our earlier discussion ofHabermas’sand Marx’s criticisms of Hegel’sconception of a nature which exists only insofar asSpirit “reflexively remembers” it. We can now seethat Hegel needed this patently untenable notion inorder to be able to apply his principle of interactionuniversally. Hegel was able to deal with labor /only ifhe first reduced it to interaction, to a struggle forrecognition. Habermas explains that if

hidden subjectivity can always be found in what hasbeen objectivized, if behind the masks of objects,nature can always be revealed as the concealedpartner, then the basic dialectical patterns ofrepresentation [i. e., language—T.F.] and labor canalso be reduced to one common denominator withthe dialectics of moral action [i.e., interaction—T.F.].For then the relationship of the name-giving and theworking subject can also be brought within theconfiguration of reciprocal recognition.[14]



configuration of reciprocal recognition.[14]

Nature is thus conceived as an object “with whichinteraction in the mode of that between subjects ispossible.”[15] Therefore, if nature is alienated Spirit,

then the goal “is not the appropriation of what hasbeen objectified, but instead the reconciliation, therestoration of the friendliness which has beendestroyed.”[16]

For Habermas, as for the younger Hegel, laborand interaction are heterogenous, irreducible to eachother. This heterogeneity, as Habermas sees it, isthe basis for rejecting both Hegel’s and Marx’stheoretical frameworks. Hegel elevates nature to thestatus of subject, the Other of Spirit, But Spirit iseverything: between Spirit and its illusory Other,neither interaction nor communication is possible aseither of them are possible between finite subjects,for “absolute spirit is solitary.”[17] Thus, inattempting to universalize interaction, Hegeldestroys it at the level of Absolute Spirit. On theother hand, a purely external nature is just asdisastrous for his philosophy of identity. The humanspecies’ instrumental, monologic relationship tonature asserts itself in the face of Hegel’s attempt todissolve it or ignore it in his system.

This truth, however, is still only part of the story,and any attempt, such as Marx’s, to extend it to thesocial totality in its entirety is wrong, in Habermas’sview. It leads to errors that are perhaps more“persuasive”-and therefore more difficult toovercome-than those that follow from Hegel’sopposite onesideness with its resultant counter-intuitive idealism. However, Habermas’s critique ofMarxism is nonetheless Hegelian insofar as it placesthe dialectics of interaction next to Marx’s dialecticsof labor. We trust that we have already shown thatHabermas is not interested in initiating an uncritical“back to Hegel” movement, but Habermasnonetheless believes that Hegel’s insights into theinteractional dimension of human beings should notbe thrown out with the philosophy of identity.

We must here note Habermas’s sympathy withMarx’s attempt to ground a critical social theorywithout succumbing to either Hegel’s idealism or tothe then emergent positivistic attack uponphilosophy. Habermas declares that

with Hegel . . . a fatal misunderstanding arises: theidea that the claim asserted by philosophical reasonagainst the abstract thought of mere understandingis equivalent to the usurpation of the legitimacy ofindependent sciences by a philosophy claiming toretain its position as universal scientific knowledge.But the actual fact of scientific progress independentof philosophy had to unmask this claim, howevermisunderstood, as bare fiction. It was this thatserved as the foundation-stone of positivism. OnlyMarx could have contested its victory. For hepursued Hegel’s critique of Kant without sharing thebasic assumption of the philosophy of identity thathindered Hegel from unambiguously radicalizing thecritique of knowledge.[18]

Habermas’s disagreement with Marx is over the

categorical framework Marx employed in hisinvestigations, a framework which “proves itselfinsufficient to establish an unconditionalphenomenological self-reflection of knowledge andthus prevent the positivist atrophy of epistemology.



thus prevent the positivist atrophy of epistemology.Considered immanently, I see the reason for this inthe reduction of the self-generative act of the humanspecies to labor.”[19]

Habermas does point out that Marx “rediscoveredthat interconnection between labor and interaction inthe dialectic of the forces of production and therelations of production.”[20] Indeed, in Marx’sconcrete investigations one will find the categories“of material activity and revolutionary practice, oflabor and reflection at once.”[21] But, Habermasinsists, “Marx interprets what he does in the morerestricted conception of the species self-reflectionthrough work alone.”[22] Thus, while Marxcontributes to the true radicalization of the critique ofknowledge and actually surpasses the Hegelianviewpoint, he nonetheless articulates thisachievement in terms that allow a positivisticmisreading of his own works:

. . . [F]or Marx, instrumental action, the productiveactivity which regulates the material interchange ofthe human species with its natural environment,becomes the paradigm for the generation of all thecategories; everything is resolved into the self-movement of production. Because of this, Marx’sbrilliant insight into the dialectical relationshipbetween the forces or production and the relations ofproduction could very quickly be misinterpreted in amechanistic manner.[23]

A mechanistic interpretation would be one thatclaims that human evolution is an automatic processwhose driving force is the accumulation of technicallyexploitable knowledge and which results in theeventual displacement of all necessary labor bymachine. In such a view, the object of social scienceis essentially no different from that of naturalscience: knowledge in both cases simply involves theaccumulation, organization, and interpretation ofempirical data; a theory of knowledge is entirelyunnecessary. Human history, here, is viewed as anoutgrowth of natural history. The human species’interactional dimension, wherein lies the species’specific difference (along with labor) from the rest ofthe animal kingdom, is lost in this view.

As a result, human self-comprehension becomeslogically impossible because such comprehensionoperates at the level of interaction. This is preciselythe positivist’s conclusion: social science ispractically impossible due to the complexity of thedata. Positivism does not see the object of socialscience on its own terms, but rather as anunmanageable variant of the “familiar” object ofnatural science. The monologic relationship betweenthe subject and the object is not questioned evenwhen the object is neither the solar system nor

molecules, but rather the class of subjectsthemselves, the human species. Positivism does notview the possibility of social theory as critique, asthe critical self-reflection of social subjects.

Positivism, as Trent Schroyer defined it in hisexposition of Habermas’s thought, “is thatconception of knowledge which denies the possibilityof reflective reconstruction of the transcendentalprinciples presupposed in human activity.”[24] Insuch a methodological framework there is no roomfor critical selfreflection or, more significantly, for therevolutionary proletarian class consciousness Marxsaw as a prerequisite for the overthrow of capitalism.

Habermas is convinced that these positivistic



Habermas is convinced that these positivisticelements pervade Marx’s conception of what he wasdoing, but also that they contradict the thrust of hiswork. This work is certainly, despite the lack ofadequate self-comprehension, an important attemptto develop a non-positivistic social theory. Therefore,if the “transcendental principles presupposed inhuman activity”[25] can in fact be reflexivelyreconstructed-and Habermas’s theory of cognitiveinterests tries to reconstruct them-then positivismcan be refuted and Marxism’s selfcomprehension canbe brought in line with its actual scientificcontribution. We shall now take a closer look at

Habermas’s account of this self-comprehension.

III

Habermas claimed that Marx developed implicitlya notion of material synthesis (or a materialisticnotion of synthesis) which he opposed to theidealistic synthesis as developed by Kant, Fichte, andHegel. For Marx, the self-reflection of consciousnessdiscloses the structure of social labor as that whichsynthesizes subject and object. Rejecting Hegel’sassumption of subject-object identity, Marx “doesnot view nature under the category of anothersubject, but conversely the subject under thecategory of another nature.”[26] Unlike idealisticsynthesis, material synthesis neither generates alogical structure, nor is it absolute: human labor,rather than transcendental consciousness, is thesynthetic agent by which a socio-economic structureis constituted; and since the subject-object relationis historically determined and does not form anidentity, it is not absolute.[27]

We should recall from our earlier discussion ofcognitive interests that Habermas claims that thereare two basic orientations of knowledge-constitutiveinterests which direct human activity: the TCI(Kantian moment) and the PCI (Fichtean moment).Habermas’s critique of Marx amounts to the chargethat Marx reproduces both moments of materialsynthesis, but reduces the PCI to a function of theTCI, thereby actually abolishing the former as adistinct, irreducible moment.

The Kantian moment reappears in Marx as the“invariant relation of the species to the naturalenvironment, which is established by the behaviorialsystem of instrumental action-for labor processesare the ‘perpetual natural necessity of human life’[Marx].” [28] Also, the Kantian noumenon orunknowable thing-in-itself also reappears in Marx’sconception of nature. As Habermas explains Marx’sposition: “No matter how far our power of technicalcontrol over nature is extended, nature retains asubstantial core that does not reveal itself toUS.”[29]

Labor may determine how nature is relativized tohuman beings in any epoch, “but it does noteliminate the independence of its [nature’s]existence.”[30] The prior existence of the world ispresupposed in productive activity, though “weourselves have access to nature only within thehistorical dimension disclosed by laborprocesses.”[31] This essentially Kantian thrustcorrects “the idealist attempt to reduce nature to amere externalization of mind [and] ... preservesnature’s immovable facticity despite nature’shistorical embeddedness in the universal structuresof mediation constituted by laboring subjects.”[32]



of mediation constituted by laboring subjects.”[32]

What labor does-and in doing so it parallels theactivity of the Kantian transcendental ego--is to giveform to preexistent “raw material.” The Kantiansubject can know only phenomena: the “things-in-themselves,” the things as they are apart from anyexperiential relation to a subject, pose noepistemological question and therefore, in principle,cannot be known. Similarly, in “his production,” Marxwrote, “man can only proceed like nature herself,that is only by changing the forms ofsubstances.”[33]

The difference between Kant and Marx is thatwhereas Kant’s cognitive process involves a logicallyunalterable set of categories that organizeexperience, Marx’s labor process transforms natureaccording to historically alterable technical rules;whereas Kant’s subject is never among the objects itstructures, Marx’s subject is always in the process ofbeing formed, not only directly by its own activity,but also by the environment it has a hand in forming.

The Fichtean moment receives an odd treatmentin Marx’s framework: it virtually becomes an aspectof the Kantian moment. Consider this succinct andrepresentative statement by Fichte: “In thinking ofyour present self-positing, which has been elevatedto clear consciousness, you must conceive ofanother such positing having preceded it withoutclear consciousness; the present one refers to thelatter and is conditioned by it.”[34]

Marx’s materialism appropriates this conceptionas follows, according to Habermas: the social totalityof laboring subjects confronts nature as an egoconfronts a non-ego. Yet preexisting nature obtainsits identity only through labor processes. As the labor

process alters nature in time, thereby bringing abouta change in itself, the laboring subjects themselveschange; their identity therefore changes:

Each generation gains its identity only via a naturethat has already been formed in history, and thisnature in turn is the object of its labor. The system ofsocial labor is always the result of the labor of pastgenerations . . . . The present subject has in somesense been “posited” by the totality of precedingsubjects, that is placed in a position to come to gripswith nature at its historically determined level. Yet itcannot regard this totality as an alien subject. Forthe labor processes through which it [i.e., the totalityof preceding subjects−T.F.] has been constitutedthemselves belong to the very same production inwhich it [i.e., the present subject−T.F.] is engagedand which it is merely carrying forward. In its laborthe present subject comprehends itself by knowingitself to have been produced as by itself through theproduction of past subjects. [35]

For Marx, therefore, social identity is anachievement of labor: the species posits itself andthereby forms itself only in the process oftransforming nature. Marx does not view the interestin social identity as a relatively autonomous humandimension, but rather relegates it to a subordinateaspect of the interest in control over nature. InMarx’s writings, Habermas argues, one finds that the“absolute ego of social production is founded in ahistory of nature that brings about the tool-makinganimal as a result.” [36]

Marx himself declared that human beings “begin



Marx himself declared that human beings “beginto distinguish themselves from animals as soon asthey begin to produce their means of subsistence, astep that is conditioned by their bodily organization”and that the “first state of affairs of which to takenote is therefore the bodily organization of theseindividuals and the relation it sets up between themand the rest of nature.”[37] In other words, what isdistinct about the human species is—above all, if notsolely—its instrumental relation to nature.

Here Habermas differs with Marx. For Habermas,the human species’ interests in identity and controlover nature are coequal and distinct aspects of thespecies’ self-generative act. If what Marx claimed onthis point were literally true, Marx’s own critique ofmystificatory ideology would be incomprehensiblebecause that critique by no means logically followsfrom the concept of capitalist production. It can onlybe comprehended as an instance of human self-comprehension which, as we have attempted toargue earlier in this paper, must be brought underthe categorical framework of symbolic interaction. Byrestricting himself to the categorical framework ofinstrumental action, Marx is forced to misconceivehis own critique as natural science.

Besides considering, for example, “the economiclaw of modern society” as a “natural law,”[38] he

significantly quotes at length and with clear approvala Russian reviewer’s assessment of his method as itis employed in Capital: the one aim of that book, thereviewer states, is

to show, by rigid scientific investigation, thenecessity of successive determinate orders of socialconditions, and to establish as impartially aspossible, the facts that serve him for fundamentalstarting points . . . . Marx treats the social movementas a process of natural history, governed by laws notonly independent of human will, consciousness andintelligence, but rather on the contrary, determiningthat will, consciousness and intelligence.[39]

Thus had positivism influenced this greatrevolutionary’s notions of what constitutes foundedknowledge of social relations: Marx’s critique of thereifications of capitalism is defective at the level ofself-comprehension.

Habermas’s position is that the speciesregenerates itself through productive labor, butforms itself through a Hegelian-like, intersubjective“struggle for recognition.” This interactionaldimension that Habermas wishes to recover takesthe form of the class struggle in modern, i.e.,capitalist, societies. In his view the class struggle isnot confined to an institutionalized power struggleover the distribution of surplus value, a directfunction of the production process. Rather, it is thearena of intersubjective relations in which conflictingself-conceptions, most of them illusory, confront andtest each other.

New technologies can free human beings fromnecessary labor, i.e., the domination of nature, onlyif human beings first overcome the domination theyimpose upon themselves in class-divided societies.Productive knowledge cannot substitute for the self-reflective knowledge people need. The distinctprocesses which result in these two different kinds ofknowledge, though interdependent, “do not converge. . . . Marx tried in vain to capture this [relativeautonomy- T.F.] in the dialectic of the forces of



autonomy- T.F.] in the dialectic of the forces ofproduction and relations of production. In vain—forthe meaning of this ‘dialectic’ must remain unclarifiedas long as the materialist concept of the synthesis ofman and nature is restricted to the categoricalframework of production.”[40]

Again, the emphasis should be on the words“categorical framework”: Habermas recognizes thatat “the level of his material investigations, . . . Marxalways takes account of social practice thatencompasses both work and interaction.”[41]

Habermas claims that Marx has shown, in hissubstantive analyses of capitalist society, that theclass struggle does not primarily take the form ofbrute force but rather of ideological delusion:products of labor do not appear as social relationsbetween people, but as physical, quantifiablerelations between things.

The commodification of human labor, Habermaswrites, “makes the object of conflict unrecognizable”for capitalists and workers alike; this process“conceals and expresses the suppression of anunconstrained dialogic relation.”[42] This objectiveillusion and the overcoming of it by social subjectsthrough critique are simply not comprehensible asmerely the ideational “feedback” of the productionprocess.

As a corrective for Marxism, Habermas suggestsa “reconstruction of the manifestations of theconsciousness of classes”—a sort of materialisticPhenomenology of Spirit—to be given the sameattention as is given to the tracing out of thedevelopment of modes of production if themethodological foundations of critical social theoryare to be articulated.[43] Only methodological paritybetween the categories “production” and“interaction” provides the possibility of a dialecticaltheory of the relation between the so-called “base”and “superstructure,” which Habermas reconcep-tualizes as PRAS’s and SIS’s.

Such a revision should also reduce the occurrenceof mechanistic treatments of the relationshipbetween these two systems in actual studies, sincesuch mistreatments would be in direct conflict withthe methodological assumptions. Truly dialecticalstudies of social reality could then be grounded assuch, and not simply declared to be dialectical in theface of presuppositions that do not allow dialecticalconclusions to follow.

Finally, Habermas’s argument, if it is to beaccepted, carries with it implications for the historyof Marxism. “Vulgar Marxist” errors of the pastcentury and a quarter may owe more to a misreadingof Marx’s overall argument than of some of his texts.A closer examination of the supposedly misrepresen-tative “mechanistic” reading of Marx attributed bymany to Engels, Lenin, and Stalin may indicate agreater fidelity to the letter of Marx than theiraccusers have allowed—although this may as wellindicate certain unclarities in Marx’s thought itself, asHabermas’s critique suggests.

Notes

[1] Quoted in Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge andHuman Interests (Boston, 1972), p. 7. Hereaftercited as KHI.

[2] KHI, p. 10.



[2] KHI, p. 10.

[3] KHI, p. 25.

[4] KHI, p. 25.

[5] KHI, p. 26.

[6] KHI, p. 196.

[7] KHI, p. 152

[8] KHI, pp. 197-98.

[9] This appears in Habermas’s book, Theory and

Practice (Boston, 1974), pp. 142-69. Hereafter citedas TAP. 10 TAP, p. 162.

[10] TAP, p. 162.

[11] TAP, p. 159.

[12] Quoted in KHI. p. 26.

[13] Quoted in TAP, p. 163, substituting“prepositing,” the translator’s parenthetical, butliteral and clearer, rendering of Voraussetzen for hisactual, but somewhat misleading, choice,“presupposing.”

[14] TAP. p. 163.

[15] Ibid.

[16] TAP, p. 164.

[17] Ibid.

[18] KHL p. 24; my emphasis.

[19] KHI. p. 42.

[20] TAP. p. 168.

[21] KHL p. 42.

[22] KHI, p. 42; my emphasis.

[23] TAP, p. 169.

[24] Trent Schroyer, The Critique of Domination (NewYork, 1973), p. 114.

[25] Ibid., p. 115.

[26] KHI, p. 32.

[27] KHI, pp. 31. 32.

[28] KHI, p. 35.

[29] KHI, p. 33.

[30] Ibid.

[31] KHI, p. 35.

[32] KHI, p. 34.

[33] Quoted in KHI, pp. 34-35.

[34] Quoted in KHI. p. 38.

[35] KHI. p. 39; correcting translator’sungrammatical “labor processes . . . itself [sic]belong . . . .”

[36] KHI. p. 41.

[37] Quoted in KHI, p. 41.

[38] Quoted in KHI, p. 45.

[39] Quoted in KHI, p. 46; substituting the standardMoore and Aveling translation of Capital (New York,1967), Vol. I, p. 18; my emphasis.

[40] KHI. p. 55, substituting “categorical” for thetext’s “categorial” in keeping with this paper’sterminology.

[41] KHI, p. 53.

[42] KHI, p. 59.

[43] See KHI, pp. 60-62.

Note: In his Habermas and Marxism: An Appraisal(Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1979), one of thefirst books on the subject, Julius Sensat wrote:“Response on the left to Habermas's work hasfrequently taken the form either of unreserved en-



frequently taken the form either of unreserved en-thusiasm or of absolute rejection, with the justi-fication of either position never getting much beyondthe level of polemics” (p. 11). This refers readers tothis note:

In my opinion this is not true of [the present essay] . . . . While more sympathetic to Habermas's critiquethan the present study, Flood's essay makes aserious attempt at clarification of Habermas's posi-tion and treats Habermas's view of Marxism as "asympathetically critical one from Marxists shouldlearn, even as they attempt to answer it."

To ease the reader’s struggle through my turgidprose, I have broken up many of the original para-graphs into smaller units. Also, since excessivelength and ambiguity of reference marred the es-say's last sentence, I changed the ungrammatical“former's accusers” to “their accusers” (i.e.,accusers of Engels, Lenin, and Stalin). Finally, the"T.F." in some of the parentheses stands for "TonyFlood," the name under which this essay wasoriginally published.

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Jurgen Habermas' Critique of Marxism - Flood

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