The Strange Death of Marxism : The European Left in the New Millennium by Paul Edward Gottfried

Author:Paul Edward Gottfried [Gottfried, Paul Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
Publisher: http://inclibuql666c5c4.onion
Published: 2005-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

⏹The Habermasian Moment

Among spokesmen for the Post-Marxist Left, Jürgen Habermas may well be the most prominent and in his own country the most honored. An advocate of “militant” democracy since the 1950s, he has defended his persuasion in the international press, in mul-tiple books and articles, and as an academic lecturer. Habermas proclaims himself to be the proud heir of the American re-education of the Germans that took place after the war. Despite his rise in the Hitlerjugend, a distinction shared with other scholars who have been equally intent on breaking with the German past, Habermas by the early fifties had moved into the anti-German Left. He regarded what the Germans had suffered during and after the war as fully deserved and spoke of his country’s unconditional sur-render as a “liberating experience.”[167]

Notwithstanding his reputation as a socialist and as an apologist for the Communist German Democratic Republic, Habermas has been reticent about a program of sweeping economic reconstruction for the West Germans. His first major publication, which came out in Merkur in 1954, “Die Dialektik der Rationalisierung,” was an extended critique of consumerism that incorporated themes from the antimodernist Right as well as from the Frankfurt School. This commentary took aim at advanced industrial societies for refusing to “place limits on technical organization in order to permit natural and social forces to express themselves.”[168] Although Habermas’s early work reprises the theme of “alienation” found in the young Marx, it also makes references to Martin Heidegger’s existential philosophy and to Arnold Gehlen’s sociobiological examination of human institutions. (Both these points of reference in Germany at the time were clearly associated with the German national right though not necessarily with the Nazis.) The influence in Habermas’s early commentary of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of the Enlightenment is too obvious to be ignored and surely impressed one graying radical. Soon after the publication of this essay, Adorno invited Habermas, who was then finishing graduate studies at Göttingen, to join him as a collaborator at the reestablished Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. The main thrust of Habermas’s youthful essay was to focus on industrial affluence as a form of “compensation” for human self-alienation. What the work teaches is that “consumption is being turned into a substitute for what humans lose as a result of technical progress.”[169]

But such cultural observations, whether or not true, do not necessarily lead into socialist projects. A long evaluation of political attitudes among German university students, framed by his introduction, that Habermas helped Adorno put together in 1957, has few recognizably socialist prescriptions. Although abounding in moral righteousness and praise for the American re-education of his countrymen, which Habermas suggests did not go far enough, Student und Politik only touches on economics tangentially, by venting disdain on moneyed interests for standing in the way of political equality. Habermas castigates German students for not being sufficiently attuned to social justice and in many cases voting for the center-right Christian Democrats; nonetheless, it is not clear what kind of economic revamping he had in mind for removing a hated capitalist past.

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