Habermas' new book: An unusually reactionary political philosophy

When the German news magazine SPIEGEL recently reported on the shattering of Marxism's most tenacious dogma under the heading "Philosophers" in its "Culture" section, it gleefully quoted a rather unusual bourgeois ideologue. According to SPIEGEL, the "important social philosopher" Jürgen Habermas, in an anthropological examination of the transition from ape to human, discovered that humanity is not redeemed, as Marx believed, by marching off to work in the morning, but rather finds its fulfillment in returning home to its family in the evening: "Karl Marx saw work as a blessing, humanity's path to self-redemption, that which makes a person human. Now Habermas comes along and proclaims something that must disturb the left (not SPIEGEL, however): Not work, but family makes a person human." Thus, SPIEGEL was once again able to make use of the back pages of a man from German science whose life's work, which became known and useful in the course of the student movement, is dedicated to the peculiar task of presenting such subtleties in the ideological struggle against the left with the claim that it is about preserving Marxism! I. The revisionist ideals of a bourgeois professor The perversity of invoking a theory one considers useless is a practice otherwise uncommon in bourgeois academia. While it has produced experts in Marxism, Marxologists want nothing to do with Marx. Conversely, contemporary Marxists tend to present their bourgeois arguments not as an attack, but as a defense of Marx, to whom they appeal. Jürgen Habermas, however, the current "Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Conditions of Life in the Scientific-Technical (and No Other!) World" in Starnberg, has consistently lived up to his aim of preparing even the heaviest hammers of bourgeois ideology for discussion of Marx. It should be recalled, among other things, that Professor Habermas resolutely confronted the leaders of the “student protest movement” when he remarked that these students did not show the necessary reverence for the bourgeois university because they intended to do something different with their education than to participate in its reform (see: “Protest Movement and (!) University Reform”, especially pp. 43f) – yet he went on to give a lecture at the summer school on Korčula in which he spoke about “some conditions for the revolutionizing of late capitalist societies”. The professor's latest work bears the weighty title: "On the Reconstruction of Historical Materialism"—and yet SPIEGEL has no trouble finding, in addition to the aforementioned joke, the passage in this reconstruction where the author hopes to be so "compelled" by "anthropological historical research" that he will have no choice but to "one day" abandon "Marxist social and historical theory. "to have to! We therefore cannot follow SPIEGEL in this case when it poses the question: "Is Habermas still a Marxist or not?" Here, we must ask with Helmut Kohl: what actually goes on in the mind of this man of science, a Marxist who allows himself to be raped by bourgeois science with relish? What is the reason that Habermas refuses to admit his hostility towards Marx when his professorial research has nothing to offer but refuting a 19th-century scientist with outpourings of modern anthropology, from which the very inability of modern anthropology to even explain Adam and Eve becomes apparent? Why does a bourgeois professor decide to spend decades "investigating" and "testing" what one would have to abandon about Marxism without actually abandoning it, while constantly repeating the truly innocent notion (this time 168) that abandoning Marxism depends on accepting the thesis of the historicity of humankind? What function does such a writer, whom fellow writers have long accused of "secret conservatism" and who has received a mixture of recognition and doubt from the bourgeois side, perform for the uniformity of our now aging critical science? Socialism: Legitimation of the bourgeois world The reason why the social philosopher Habermas considers himself an advocate of Marxism is found neither in the Marx quotations he likes to use to indulge his imagination, nor can it be gleaned from consulting the bourgeois conception of Marxism. When Habermas explains to the delegates of the 17th German Sociological Congress that he " wants to adopt the theoretical (!) claim of historical materialism," he is not appropriating Marx as the key witness for the demise of the capitalist system, but rather for its continuation. It occurs to this professor to "connect" with Marx because he sees in him not the critic of capitalism, but rather the cultural critic concerned with the moral fate of humanity. "According to Marxist theory, socialism not only seals the self-destruction(!) of the bourgeois world; it is also supposed to be its legitimate heir , preserving, unleashing, and developing the productive)!!) forces of the bourgeois world." (Reconstruction, p. 49) Such statements, which the professor always "includes" in his lengthy trains of thought to emphasize the self-evident nature of his self-conception as a Marxist , reveal that we are dealing with a bourgeois professor who has taken the conscience of revisionism (1) to heart. Therefore, let us briefly recall the very unscrupulousness in which the professor is philosophically interested. While Karl Marx shows in "Capital" that the periodic economic upheaval of the capitalist mode of production is a crisis in the valorization of capital, under which the workers exploited by capital continue to suffer even when the crisis is over for capital (cf. MSZ 8/1975 "The Crisis" ), revisionist politics uses the activities of the capitalist state, which ensure that this relationship remains unchanged, as a pretext to bombard the masses with the wishful thinking of a crisis of capitalism . From the fact that this society is constantly in turmoil, the revisionist takes the position that the bourgeois order is outdated . By leveling the grandiose accusation against the vigorously active capital that it has forfeited its historical right , he asserts his claim to be the rightful heir to the direction of society 's destiny . In other words, he asserts his claim to the class state (which, in the reconstruction on page 108, is given a clean bill of health with reference to Hegel and Marx, as not being a "real" but merely an "existing" state). "As long as society has class structures, the state organization must give preferential consideration to partial interests over overall interests ," to have a democratic say, to transform it into an instrument of the entire people. Since the ideals of revisionism have accompanied the course of capitalism, capital is therefore not being fought. Instead, several generations of the working class, already lost to destruction , have had to wait in disappointment for the inevitability of capitalist collapse . And where the legitimate heir of the bourgeois world holds sway in the state, the masses are allowed to rejoice in the "preservation, release, and further development of the productive forces of the bourgeois world," as Professor Habermas aptly, albeit with outrageous naiveté, observes: for a social philosopher of his ilk believes that the capital of the bourgeois world consists of educational planners, artists, and himself! Marx and Engels: Guardians of Culture That Habermas now presents Marxism as a concern for the fate of the bourgeois world and accuses the bourgeois state of lacking a willingness to embrace democracy does not mean that a bourgeois professor has thereby established his political engagement . Habermas neither sees himself as a partisan of democratic socialism nor is he a comrade of Comrade Steigerwald , in order to assume an important sub-task in the struggle for the establishment of anti-monopoly democracy through Marxist cultural critique. Professor Habermas's political involvement in the world-historical debacle of the last hundred years lies only in his interest in Marx and Engels as theorists who reflected on the crisis of bourgeois culture . He is drawn to Marxism because he has discovered in the theory of class struggle not only a "no," but above all a "yes" to the "self-destruction of bourgeois society"—a perversion of Marx and Engels, which, admittedly, is built on fertile ground. Ever since Marxist philosophy existed, it has been clear that Marxism has made a valuable contribution to preserving the cultural heritage, "the best of humanity"; it is clear that Marx responsibly scoured the history of higher human consciousness to see if anything of value could be found within it—even though Marx himself states that such a history never existed. Whether it's the philosopher Lenin, or whether their names are Korsch or Buhr , whether it's a case of half-baked knowledge from Yugoslavia—the riddle from "The German Ideology," namely why the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class, remains unsolved by Marxist philosophers despite their diligent quoting. Moreover, the social philosopher Habermas cannot reconcile himself with it. “Although , in a phrase from ‘The German Ideology,’ the prevailing ideas are the ideas of the ruling class, Marx and Engels did not simply understand the content of cultural tradition as ideological consciousness; for them, only those forms of consciousness that simultaneously conceal and betray an underlying class structure , and thus contribute to legitimizing existing legal and political orders, are ideological.” (Reconstruction, p. 50) The cultural critic Habermas is in the process of turning Marx's critique of bourgeois ideology into its exact opposite: an approving acknowledgment . According to revisionist ideological preservation, Marx did not attack capitalist consciousness when he derived its falsity from the "underlying class structures." Rather, he confronted the dominant consciousness with such understanding using his famous materialist method (this method, as the pseudo-dialectician Habermas, in legitimate inheritance from the years of ideological critique by his teacher Adorno , reports, transforms an ideology into truth (by "betraying" class rule!) and simultaneously renders class rule unassailable—because the ideology is a "concealment"!) that he could, with a clear conscience, pursue his goal of using science, art, philosophy, and not forgetting religion, for the cultural education of the proletariat! And because Professor Habermas is very keen to justify the traditional forms of consciousness with their underlying class structures and not to challenge these “structures”, he also uses Marx to legitimize the bloodbath that the bourgeoisie wreaked in its enforcement against “traditional class societies” in the name of the continuous development of humankind : “In this sense, for example, Marx, within the framework of historical materialism, attempts to both relativize and justify the right of bourgeois revolutionary rhetoric(!), that is, the right of that critique which has been exercised in the name of bourgeois ideals against the foundations of traditional class societies.” ( Reconstruction, p. 336) It hardly needs further proof that a critical Marxist like Habermas abhors nothing more than criticism of bourgeois ideals! And to anyone who nevertheless demands it, Habermas assures us once again that he values ​​Marx solely because he believes that Marx's "critical stance" toward capitalism has yielded nothing but evidence for the recognition of everything our society produces daily. Habermas almost indignantly rejects an "ideological critique" from a discussion partner who seems to hold a somewhat different view on the problem of how a critical scholar could legitimize capitalism . “Marx only ever criticized the universalism(!) of bourgeois value systems because they conceal the dominance of a class interest, thus only seemingly expressing a generalizable interest .” (Reconstruction, p. 333) This too is no small outrage. It's not bourgeois Marx-bashing and school textbooks that manage to deny the atheism and immorality of Marx and Engels—how could they! No, it took a century of Marxist philosophy to add this final twist to all the distortions the founders of scientific socialism had to endure. Marx and Engels didn't criticize a certain Feuerbach for downplaying Christianity —no, they themselves had nothing else in mind but to proclaim to the masses: The priests may still be there today to legitimize your exploitation, but once that legitimacy is gone, they'll belong to you! The state of this world: Too little morality, too much money The world spirit can truly do without a reactionary cultural philosopher named Habermas, who, in refined German, likes to proclaim that Marx's stays at the London National Library served the purpose of restoring Christianity to its rightful place in socialism, after it had been prevented in capitalism, by the compulsion to rationalize all traditional areas of life so peculiar to this social order (see, for example, the first page of "Technology and Science as 'Ideology'") , from representing a "generalizable interest" as it did in the Middle Ages – it is bad enough that the communists, as elsewhere in the other part of Germany, have not only not expelled the church leaders but have harnessed them for their political purposes , so that it is extremely embarrassing for them when Pastor Brüsewitz reveals that an honest socialist pastor can go mad and must sacrifice himself for God , as in the Middle Ages ! However, the aforementioned quotations also clarify the interests that the social philosopher Habermas presents as Marxist cultural critics. The fact that Habermas does not participate in the practical attempt to finally transform our state into an institution that acts in the people's interest stems from the fact that the Starnberg director, like Critical Theory in general, claims Marxist cultural criticism for higher purposes , rather than risking professional bans for his commitment to democracy. With all his writings, Habermas, who is not, as Der Spiegel claims, a "significant social philosopher" but rather a reactionary political philosopher, wants to make only one thing clear (even and especially when he is engaged in discussing the most obscure problems of bourgeois science): the people have their livelihood in this economic and social order; in that respect , capitalism is fine . What is not fine for Habermas , however, are the deplorable circumstances that "the state can no longer achieve integration via(!) norms " (Reconstruction, p. 110), that "empirically"(!) "the development towards mass atheism can hardly be denied anymore" (Reconstruction, p. 107), Furthermore, that the sciences have been infected by the plague of positivism : “Meanwhile, bourgeois consciousness has become cynical (!)”, in that the social sciences have been “thoroughly cleared of binding(!) normative content” (Reconstruction, pp. 10/11); (The phrase "became" refers, by the way, to Habermas's view that in Marx's time the moral consciousness of bourgeois economists and other ideologues was still clean , so that they could "take Marx at his word(!) and criticize him immanently," which, however, led to the foolish consequence that Marx spread only " unclear" about the "normative foundation" of his own theory "from the very beginning" (a blatant lie, Mr. Philosopher!). And why did Marx keep the world in the dark about his values? Because he thought he could solve "this problem" in a "stroke of luck," "namely with an appropriation of Hegelian logic declared(!) as materialist." (—Oh, madness... Who else in the world besides Professor Habermas could be sustained by this logic ??) Finally, the professor finds it unacceptable that “the sovereignty of the state towards the outside has become anachronistic ”, “the national identity is disintegrating ” (Reconstruction, p. 30).   Habermas is concerned that citizens are indifferent to this fact, as can be seen, for example, in the fact that "the Federal Republic has the first army from which the responsible minister expects it to maintain its combat readiness without an enemy image " (Reconstruction, p. 29), so that Habermas sees no way in sight for the preservation of the “already constituted world society” , “without relying on political(!) and normative integration.” (110) And because the cultural critic Habermas is an extremely conceited person, he has comprehensively summarized all that he considers to be the problems of humanity in the title of his speech accepting the Hegel Prize of the City of Stuttgart (as you can see, in this world not only Marx but also Hegel is spared nothing) in a way that preserves the state: "Can complex societies develop a rational identity?" The clown from Starnberg: an exotic partisan of capital Let Kasper from Starnberg (1) be complained about: “Complex societies” can not only develop a rational identity, the worst part is that “complex societies” do so constantly. The citizens of this country are practically dealing with the identity of capital; the state just as practically ensures that people remain rational; and the bourgeois social scientists are pleased that the “rational identity” of citizen and state is already functioning so well. Only a late-capitalist Young Hegelian finds the existing propaganda machine insufficient, the partisanship of bourgeois science insufficient, imperialism insufficient. Only the squeaky-clean Habermas comes up with the idea, in the interest of preserving capitalism, of posing the critical question to the state as to whether it doesn't also believe that its foundation, capitalism, has become unfit for purpose . If capitalism lacks reason, argues our Marxist cultural critic, then it is not necessary to democratize existing reason, but rather, in the interest of reason, to examine the foundations of the state to determine to what extent capitalism is not completely losing its grip. Only an analysis of the present, which "after the exhaustion of the innovation and adaptation potential of existing social structures" Anyone who inquires can help, and this analysis is "only available," as Habermas is fond of saying, "when the existing sciences free themselves from their uncritical partisanship and allow themselves to be guided by the partisanship of Marxist cultural critique, a.k.a. "philosophy of history with a practical purpose." This exotic partisan of capital thus has nothing less in mind than to make Marxism the state-supporting ideology of capitalism. And what earned students who discovered Marx the insult of being labeled left-wing fascists was nothing more than Professor Habermas's honorable endeavor to liberate Critical Theory from its shadowy existence (Adorno), its spontaneity ( Marcuse ), and its senility ( Horkheimer ), in order to make it useful for the task of revising the inherited bourgeois ideologies in such a way that their efforts to prevent class struggle are shaped by the state-philosophical standpoint of the historical materialist Habermas. II. With structuralism and neo-evolutionaryism – a campaign against Dzhugashvili In all his writings, Habermas therefore pursues the goal of guiding interest in Marxism onto the right path. While he once abhorred the "revolutionary romanticism" of the SDS because it was not exactly conducive to the acceptance of Marxism in bourgeois science, today he writes on the very first page of his reconstruction of historical materialism what the correct way to deal with Marx consists of: "In our context , reconstruction means taking a theory apart and reassembling it in a new form in order to better achieve the goal it has set for itself : this is the normal (I mean: normal even for Marxists) way of dealing with a theory that in some respects needs revision , but whose potential for stimulation has still not been exhausted." (Reconstruction, p. 9) Note the audacity with which the professor dictates how Marx should be studied: when the chief falsifier of Marx informs those interested in Marxism that Marx is outdated , this is almost unimportant to Habermas compared to his interest in drawing attention to the use of Marx for his own purposes, in giving new impetus to the exploitation of Marx's ideas for the benefit of the science he so vehemently opposed—an exploitation that has been ongoing since Marx's death ! And those who, while reading "Capital," come to the conclusion that the antagonism between capital and labor is not particularly amusing, the professor declares even more brazenly to be " corrupt": “Restoration would mean a return to an initial state (a condition!) that has since been corrupted: but my interest in Marx and Engels is neither dogmatic nor historical-philological. Renaissance would mean the renewal of a tradition that has since been buried : Marxism has no need for that .” (Reconstruction, p. 9) Because Habermas always knew that such insults alone wouldn't sway students, social workers, teachers, and trade union youth who look to Marx for guidance on societal change , his collected drivel always includes "arguments" whose purpose is to make it clear that capitalism is fine and needs no criticism . Our self-righteous busybody always proceeds by pretending to discuss the problems of those dissatisfied with this society. A prime example of this "explanatory strategy" is the aforementioned lecture on "Some Conditions for the Revolutionizing of Late Capitalist Societies," in which Habermas proclaims that capitalism doesn't need to be abolished at all because... "namely, satisfying the economic interest (!) of consumers (!) in socially produced goods and services and (!) that of employees (!) in reduced working hours (!) " (Culture and Criticism, 80) The “unjust exchange” of the 19th century (allegedly the basis of Marx and Engels’ revolutionary ideas!) has, according to the state ideologue Habermas, been eliminated by the establishment of “regulated” (!) “exchange relations” between the social partners, so that unrest at the grassroots level is no longer to be expected. Anyone interested in Marx should therefore know that capitalism is the ultimate goal of history, because the history of the capitalist state so impressively testifies to its functioning: "In the decades since the Second World War, the most advanced capitalist countries have succeeded in keeping the core areas of class conflict latent (!); in stretching the business cycle and transforming the periodic surges of capital devaluation into a permanent inflationary crisis with milder cyclical fluctuations; and finally, in broadly filtering the dysfunctional side effects ( !) of the contained economic crisis and distributing them via quasi-groups (such as consumers, pupils and their parents, road users, the sick, the elderly, etc.) or via subgroups with a low degree of organization(?) . As a result(!) the social identity of the classes has been dissolved and class consciousness fragmented ." (Reconstruction, p. 310) Even if Habermas thereby merely confirms impressively that in his lust for the "it" he has not the slightest clue about the activity of the state – the sole purpose of such defensive work is to send those interested in Marx, if not into the fight against society, then at least into the fight against... Stalin : "The version of historical materialism established by Stalin requires reconstruction. This reconstruction should serve the critical analysis of competing approaches (especially social-scientific neo-evolutionaryism and structuralism )." (Reconstruction, p. 144) One can only speculate about the measures the former seminarian from Georgia would have taken had he been targeted in this way by the class enemy during his lifetime. What is clear, however, is that Professor Habermas leaves no stone unturned in his efforts to force people who have other problems to grapple with, like our cultural critics, to first acknowledge the problems of modern science. (And a glance at pedagogy books shows that he is successful.) This aim—to avoid jeopardizing the recognition of Marxism as the state's pillar ideology—ultimately leads the professor to lash out in scorn and derision at the Marxist community at our universities and institutes, who indulge in tedious commentaries on Marx (long forgotten) or in barren Marxist derivations of the state from the commodity (which have nothing to do with Marx and are therefore constantly being made more "fruitful") (Reconstruction, p. 267)! III. Marxism as a state-enhancing productive force After Professor Habermas has thus clarified (and has done so since his inaugural lecture) his intention in adopting the claim of historical materialism (namely, to prevent the study of Marx), the instructive chapter of his intellectual world opens up to us, as it does to him , in which he pursues his task of dispelling the distrust of Marx and Engels as 19th-century scientists in his actual addressee, the bourgeois ideologues infected by objectivism . Thus, his aim is to rid sociology of the foolish prejudice that the use of Marxist economics inevitably leads to the unwelcome class struggle — on the contrary , the Starnberg director assures us: the theory of value is the best instrument for the class state. "The theory of value can be understood as a system of allocation rules that allows statements describing the capitalist economic process from a systems-theoretical perspective of control to be translated into statements about antagonistic relationships between social classes: 'Capital' is both a value expression with which statements can be formed at the analytical level of the economic system and an expression of a class relationship that can be analyzed in basic action-theoretical concepts . From a research-strategic point of view , the theory of value aims to make problems of system integration (!) representable at the level of social integration (!). Marx constructs the control mechanism of exchange as a reflective relationship between interacting parties in order to be able to reach through systems-theoretical connections to class struggles, i.e., (!) to historically representable interactions." (Reconstruction, p. 223) Every Habermas quote has two sides: one of audacity and one of charlatanism. It is an unparalleled audacity when Habermas, in his 103 words on the theory of value, doesn't utter a single word about value itself , simply because he's so eager to demonstrate the usefulness of Marx. According to Habermas, Marx, with his economics, devised rules for how to steer the capitalist economic process . His aim, therefore, was to use "Capital" to help Messrs. Friderichs and Apel, including the directors of the banks. Marx even considered the aspects of social partnership, intending his rules for controlling the economy not merely as technical instructions, but also as measures designed to ensure that the trading partners, capital and labor, do not engage in their "antagonistic relations" during wage negotiations, but rather interact in such a "reflective" manner that the interests of "social integration" are preserved. Habermas not only has the audacity to push his obsequiousness so far as to portray Marx as a scholar who thought in the interests of the capitalist welfare state—Professor Habermas is also a despicable charlatan. If only he were capable of actually doing what he merely promises ! If only he and his pack of left-wing sociologists were able to actually write "Capital" as a "systems theory , " to analyze class struggles as historical "interactions," instead of concealing the impossibility of such an undertaking by demonstrating his partisanship and living off the public at the expense of others by pointing to the possibility of making something other than what the theory of value actually is ! Wage Labor and Capital: A History of a Learning Process Just as the transformation of the economist Marx into a sociologist who supposedly constructed a systems theory in the interest of addressing the problems of the state is characterized by the attempt to present Marx as if he were operating at the scientific standard of modern science, as if he were a methodologist. Whether Habermas presents Marx's explanation of the difference between humans and animals through labor (MEW 3, p. 21) as an "acceptable explanatory strategy," praising it as a successful "methodological insight" (although our master himself cites the quotation, he fails to grasp that Marx is precisely at this point expressing his disdain for methodical approaches!), only to then immediately reframe this explanation as a "recommendation," "to describe the relationship(!) between organism(!) and environment(!) at the level (!) of work processes(!) (Reconstruction, p. 145)," where the “decisive factor” is the dilution of the work "into the sociological aspect of the targeted transformation of material according to rules of instrumental action" (ibid.) should be; be it that “Even (!) Marx attached great importance to the category of the ‘social division of labor’ ” (Reconstruction, p. 156), because the division of labor fulfills the wish of the cultural critic Habermas to increase “the steering capacity of a society ” (ibid.), Be it... be it... be it... that Habermas transforms even the heaviest morsel from Marx's poison kitchen into drinking water for bourgeois sociologists. He quotes from the preface to "Capital" the "most famous formulation of the superstructure theorem," that is, the passage where Marx states, as the result of his science, that the joke in the life of humanity is economics , one way or another—only to express his regret "that for a long time an economic version (!!!) of this theorem has prevailed" (R 157). And why regrettable? Because in this case, the "theorem" would state... "that processes of the higher(!) subsystems are determined by processes of the respective lower(!) subsystems in the sense(!) of causal dependency ." (ibid.) One could therefore no longer derive the highbrow nonsense of a bourgeois professor from the depths of human existence with causality! While Marx, interestingly, doesn't address the problem of necessity at this point, sociologists from Engels to Kautsky to Habermas have always been bothered by the fact that Marx does indeed speak of a necessity , namely the relentlessness with which capital determines what happens on this planet. Sociologists, however, refuse to acknowledge that Marx recorded this insight in the preface to "Capital" because he proved it in "Capital" —and they refuse because their bias demands that they not examine society, but rather dissect its determinism into factors , in search of a guarantee that a society like ours won't fall apart. In this endeavor, they discover that Marx cannot help them, and they accuse him of having absolutized the economic factor in his "systems theory" ! Habermas quotes Engels's assurance that Marx did not mean economics in such an "absolute" way, but rather spoke of an "interaction between base and superstructure," adds the fool Kautsky, who claimed that Marx's insights only applied to innovations in history, and then concludes the discussion about the "superstructure theorem" with the feat of revealing that Marx, and not Habermas, was a follower of the notorious renegade Kautsky. He triumphantly announces to Messrs. Parsons and Luhmann, "Marx introduces the concept of the base to define a range of problems to which an explanation of revolutionary innovations must refer. The theorem then states that revolutionary innovations can only solve those problems that arise in the base area." (Reconstruction, p. 158) In this way, Habermas manages to attribute to Marx the idea that he had proven himself as a theorist of social evolution in his investigations of pre-capitalist modes of production, that he had pursued the sociological problem of change and stability in evolution, and that he had claimed that the history of capital is a history of trial and error (!). IV. Marx: A somewhat naive systems theorist With this assertion, Professor Habermas has reached the end of his argument to present Marx as a useful state ideologue. He now all the more emphatically draws attention to the shortcomings inherent in a 19th-century scholar. Because he has transformed Marx's theory into a sociological systems theory, Habermas can also smugly mock the fact that Marx had only a very imperfect understanding of the purpose of his scientific endeavors. Since his egregious treatise "Labor and Interaction: Remarks on Hegel's Jena Philosophy of Spirit," Habermas, under the pretext of verifying the consistency of Hegel's, and especially Marx's, statements on topics such as labor, class struggle, etc., has pursued no other interest than to cobble together his systems theory by means of methodological rambling about the use of categories in Marx and Hegel. The outlandish accusation against Marx that he was unable to distinguish between labor and interaction serves no other purpose than to proclaim to established sociology that it is incomplete without the complement of his anthropology, according to which the functioning of our “complex society” is conditioned by the use of tools (“instrumental action”) and by the discussion of norms (“interaction”). Habermas counters the “sometimes unreflectively manifested historico-philosophical legacy” (10) in Marx by “replacing” the “too abstract” concept of the “mode of production” with the sociological concept of the organizational principle—the latter corresponding to his yearning for a state that secures the accumulation of capital and in which citizens can submit to their morality without coercion . "The organizational principle of a society defines the scope of possibilities; in particular, it determines within which structures changes to the institutional system are possible; to what extent existing productive forces can be used socially or the development of new productive forces can be stimulated..." (Reconstruction, p. 168) In an attempt to dispel the serious concerns of his colleagues that his reconstruction of historical materialism, despite all efforts, still betrayed the ineradicable dogmatic tendencies of a Marxist, Habermas once again takes a strong stance. He expresses himself disparagingly about the sterility of the "division" of history into a fixed "series of developmental modes of production" (163) common among Marxists (the interested Marxist learns from Habermas that the current state of Marxist discussion is characterized by the assumption of six(!) universal modes of production" (165)) and extols the usefulness of his "organizational principle" to modern "anthropological and historical research": "An organizational principle consists of such abstract regulations that several functionally equivalent modes of production are permitted in the social formation it establishes." (Reconstruction, p. 169) And because even this opening does not seem sufficient for Habermas to dispel the doubts, he even puts his most sacred belief up for discussion – to make it clear that he has never questioned anything: "Historical materialism does not need to posit a generic subject in which evolution takes place. Rather, the agents(!) of evolution are societies and the agents of action integrated within them" (Reconstruction, p. 154). One can only think: how stupid does Habermas actually think his fellow academics are, not to notice that the first sentence omits a subject in order to present two in the next? V. A universal vulgar genius with a penchant for China It is not only this final act in our reconstruction of Professor Habermas's purpose in adopting the reconstruction of historical materialism that has clarified that no further action will follow. Far from revising modern social science through his political-philosophical standpoint, Habermas has merely demonstrated that he is a bourgeois ideologue gripped by the ambition to apply it universally . Regardless of the fact that Der Spiegel will continue to report on the award-winning "awards" of Marxism (it will happen in the next few weeks: Habermas has just received the Sigmund Freud Prize!), the result of this "analysis of the present" is clear: the reactionary drivel of a bourgeois academic. As an economist , Habermas expressed his satisfaction that our country's factories functioned smoothly and that capitalism was the first epoch in human history in which material needs were met. As a sociologist, Habermas, with a glance at the nearest sociology textbook, demonstrated that the "unity of our social lifeworld through values ​​and norms" is assured, proving himself a functionalist who legitimizes prevailing law and legislation with the necessity of preserving individuals capable of speech and action within society. As a psychologist, Habermas expressed his interest in the fact that the instillation of prevailing morality is "the decisive part of personality development for ego identity." As a historian , he admired "Neolithic societies" because "collective identity" remained untouched in them, and noted with satisfaction that further progress in history was ensured by the recognition of a "ruling figure." As an anthropologist , he took an even deeper look into evolution and arrived at the topic of apes. He asserts that apes only managed the gradual transition to becoming human because they transformed their closed society into an open one (Popper sends his regards!), and that this, in turn, was only possible because the apes "moralized" their "motives for action." (So the debate about legitimacy has been going on forever!) Returning to "modernity," Habermas laments the decline of faith brought about by the development of modern rationalization, a decline which, as is well known, has not even spared science. Therefore, Habermas becomes active as a political scientist and develops a theory of the state, from which it emerges that the state has not digested the "exclusion of the economy," and it is therefore no wonder that it can no longer produce a "collective identity" capable of halting the decline of morals. Thus, only one thing remains: Habermas as a philosopher of the state.In this capacity, he first expresses his hope that "capitalist rationality" has not yet been "exhausted," citing as evidence the "striking example" of "modern art," but also less conspicuous things like the "depathologization of mental illness" and, for the "denationalization of politics," curriculum planners; second, he berates the citizens because they cannot be prevented from "accumulating privately available material objects" instead of "establishing social relationships in which reciprocity prevails"; third, he presents the principle behind this berating, his "communicative ethics," on which, as we hear, he is still working; and fourth and last, he feels a longing for the Far East when he considers the missed "opportunity of the workers' movement" (in socialism, work is done and criticism is forbidden, instead of taking Habermas as an example, who only develops critiques!): Socialism “is the first example of a reflexive identity, a collective identity no longer retrospectively tied to specific doctrines and ways of life, but prospectively to rules of production and programs. So far, such an identity formation has only been able to persist in social movements; whether societies in a normal state(!) can also develop such a fluid identity is questionable. Such a society would have to adapt to great mobility not only with its productive resources, but also with its processes of norm and value formation. For now, however, this is only being experimented with in China.” (Reconstruction, p. 30) The reference to the Far East is simultaneously a reference to the longing that Habermas has been giving form to for two decades now through sociological, political, anthropological, and critical theories of science: He desires harmony between citizens and state power and, in the name of this ideal—for which he refuses to practically advocate like the justice fanatics in revisionist parties—permits himself the construction of corresponding "designs." He diligently uses Marxist theory as evidence for his cause, which can only be achieved by transforming it into a plea for the realization of all the ideals that humanity dreams of in the face of the practical collisions and acts of violence inherent in capitalist society. Where Marx uncovers the root causes of competition and state violence and pursues policies aimed at abolishing private property, Habermas distorts him into a pathetic partisan of "true" humanity, "genuine" democracy, and unbroken morality. He quotes him (and other serious men of science) when he laments the "decline" of the bourgeois public sphere; what bothers him about the monotonous controversies of modern journalism concerning the most effective conduct of state affairs is the lack of a "critically reasoning public," that is, the fact that reasoning has become a profession and is not actively practiced by the victims of state measures—and in this "scientific" formulation of the concerns of state propaganda squads, he doesn't hesitate to mourn the coffeehouses and salons of early capitalism ("Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere"). He quotes him (and the others) when he proclaims the (self-)critical submission of individuals to the role that awaits them in professional life as the purpose of education, and when he values ​​not only a sense of duty but also "role distance" and "empathy" (Theory of Socialization). He quotes him again when he explains to bourgeois science, which has long since dissolved into self-serving viewpoints, that nothing would be better than an "emancipatory interest" in (not in) science, thus propagating "generalizable interests" that do not exist in practical life. He doesn't hesitate to sell the invention of the "consensus theory of truth," the absurd equation of scientific objectivity with "intersubjectivity," as a continuation of Marx's aims ("Communicative Competence")—and even when he realizes that his efforts contradict Marx, he brazenly claims that he is helping Marx's "true" intention to prevail ("Knowledge and Human Interests"; "Labor and Interaction"). Etc. If he now summarizes his past achievements and presents them to the public as a "reconstruction of historical materialism," he can be sure of the same level of interest in the academic community as before: many more volumes of reviews will be filled in which his colleagues, who are enthusiastic about an effective state and considerate citizens, deny Habermas's "project" any realism. Even their own ignorance will find arguments to support their claim that Marxism offers nothing for their cause—and the responsible statesmen, faced with the uselessness of the "proposals" emanating from Starnberg, will likely increasingly consider dissolving that ominous institute. This, however, does not mean that Habermas, as a theoretical champion of a rational (= harmonious) capitalism with a strong sense of identity, communication, and responsible individuals, will be destined for unemployment. His way of discrediting Marx and portraying the contradictions of capitalism as no longer existing is still good for a professorship: after all, the need for his moral universalism exists precisely because of these contradictions! ___________________________ (1) In 1971, Habermas moved to Starnberg near Munich, where he co-directed the Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Life Conditions of the Scientific-Technical World with Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker until 1981. He commented on his departure from Frankfurt in a letter to Herbert Marcuse: “In a way, it is a ‘symbolic act’ that marks the end of the Frankfurt School.” ( Wikipedia, Habermas )   From: MSZ 14 – December 1976