HABERMAS AND THE RATIONAL UTOPIA
2001
By Dr Peter Critchley
Critchley, P. 2001., Habermas and the Rational Utopia [e-book] Available through: Academia website <http://mmu.academia.edu/PeterCritchley/Papers
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr Peter Critchley is a philosopher, writer and tutor with a first degree in the field of the Social Sciences (History, Economics, Politics and Sociology) and the degree of PhD in the field of Philosophy, Ethics and Politics. Peter works in the tradition of Rational Freedom, a tradition which sees freedom as a common endeavour in which the freedom of each individual is co-existent with the freedom of all. In elaborating this concept, Peter has written extensively on a number of the key thinkers in this ‘rational’ tradition (Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Dante, Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Habermas). Peter is currently engaged in an ambitious interdisciplinary research project entitled Being and Place. The central theme of this research concerns the connection of place and identity through the creation of forms of life which enable human and planetary flourishing in unison. Peter tutors across the humanities and social sciences, from A level to postgraduate research. Peter particularly welcomes interest from those not engaged in formal education, but who wish to pursue a course of studies out of intellectual curiosity. Peter is committed to bringing philosophy back to its Socratic roots in ethos, in the way of life of people. In this conception, philosophy as self-knowledge is something that human beings do as a condition of living the examined life. As we think, so shall we live. Living up to this commitment, Peter offers tutoring services both to those in and out of formal education.
The subject range of Peter’s tutoring activities, as well as contact details, can be seen at http://petercritchley-e-akademeia.yolasite.com
The range of Peter’s research activity can be seen at http://mmu.academia.edu/PeterCritchley
Peter sees his e-akademeia project as part of a global grassroots learning experience and encourages students and learners to get in touch, whatever their learning need and level.
1 INTRODUCTION 2
2 THE DIVISION BETWEEN SYSTEM AND LIFE WORLD 5
3 IDEAL COMMUNICATION COMMUNITY 14
4 THE LIMITATIONS OF HABERMAS’S COMMUNICATIVE RATIONALITY 18
6 THE PUBLIC SPHERE 24
7 TOWARDS, THE PROLETARIAN PUBLIC SPHERE 29
1 INTRODUCTION
This paper appraises Jurgen Habermas’ attempt to reclaim the emancipatory terms of ‘rational freedom’ on the modern terrain, paying particular attention to possibilities for a democratic public sphere generated out of the lifeworld. Habermas is firmly part of the tradition of 'rational freedom'. Looking to realise the freedom of each and all within community (Habermas 1992:146), Habermas is concerned to reject the postructuralist accusation that 'rational’ unity necessarily entails the totalitarian suppression of difference and autonomy (Lyotard 1984:73). Arguing that the social and philosophical grounds of both individualist liberalism and orthodox marxism have dissolved, Habermas argues that a critical theory of modernity is more adequately grounded in the 'suppressed traces of Reason' (Pusey 1987:14/5).
Habermas' 'rational' ideal anticipates and justifies a post-capitalist 'good' society characterised by the greatest possible happiness, peace, and community.
'The pursuit of happiness’ might one day mean something different - for example, not accumulating material objects of which one disposes privately, but bringing about social relations in which mutuality predominates and satisfaction does not mean triumph of one over the repressed needs of the other.
CES 1979:199
Habermas may be placed on the side of those attempting to reassess the value of liberalism within the project of the left. As Habermas himself says: 'my Marxist friends are not entirely unjustified in accusing me of being liberal' (Habermas 1986:170/1). He has characterised his work as ‘an attempt to reconstruct Kantian ethics’ (1986:160). Habermas, moreover, adopts a characteristically liberal silence on the nature of the good. The purpose of moral theory is to supply a theory of justice.
Deontic, cognitive and universal moral theories in the Kantian tradition are theories of justice, which must leave the question of the good life unanswered.... One should not place excessive demands on moral theory, but leave something over for social theory, and the major part for the participants themselves.
1986:174
One of the intentions of this thesis is to show that the possibility of a political morality situated in the everyday interaction of individuals as moral and political agents exists in Mark's ontology of the good life. Habermas' s work challenges the notion of the good that derives from Marx, repudiating the ontology of labour, the possibility of system crises with transformative potential, class conflict as the dynamic of history, the possibility of reappropriating alienated social power. In attempting to formulate a new approach to Marx that emphasises themes of social pluralisation, democratisation and individualisation, there is plenty to learn from Habermas and the way that he has examined the conditions of possibility of critical theory. Most important is the way that Habermas develops a notion of communicative rationality and links it to an account of social rationalisation within a broader framework of social evolution (Thompson 1984:ch 8 ch 9).
defining Marx's project in terms of the realisation of a socialist public is to make good this deficiency. Habermas offers his own version. Habermas offers his own model of civil society, one not reduced - as in Hegel and Marx - to commodity exchange and anonymous laws (Habermas 1996:45). Habermas excludes economic and governmental associations from his model of civil society so that his 'institutional core of civil society' comprises 'more or less spontaneously emergent associations, organisations and movements' which communicate popular concerns to the public sphere. These institutions possess an egalitarian and open form of organisation (Habermas 1996:366/7) but they do not, as in Marx, aim at 'holistic aspirations to a self-organising society'. At the same time, in this version of double democratisation, the state, 'the administrative power deployed for the purposes of social planning' 'is not a suitable medium for fostering emancipated forms of life' (1996:372). The state and civil society remain functionally separate. The state's role is limited to nurturing projects initiated in civil society; it cannot initiate them itself by direct intervention.
Habermas' perspective is founded upon the radical demarcation of instrumental rationality and substantive rationality, the system world of money (economics) and power (politics) and the life world of reciprocity, of labour and communicative interaction, object and subject, structure and agency. Habermas thus reproduces the classical dualisms of modern social thought which necessarily reproduce the tension between instrumental rationality and substantive irrationality (Clarke 1991:305 306). As such his project fails.
both devalues labour as a source of self-realisation as well as condemning communication to a thin and narrow existence.
This comes directly to the critical issue - power, its alienation and the possibility for its reappropriation. Habermas is quite clear that attempts to abolish relations of domination must concentrate on the life world and accept the necessity of a system world organised by the steering media of money and power. Perhaps 'functional power' is necessary (Gorz 1982:65); but it is alienated power that is in Marx's sight. One is in the midst of a Neue Sittlichkeit (Anderson 1992:329). The affirmation of money and administrative power as functionally imperative steering media do not conceal the fact that this is the rationalisation of the state and capital as alienated social power. The life world cannot reclaim this power (Anderson 1992:329). From Marx's perspective, this entails the continued subjection of individuals to their own powers; individuals will not be self-determining but systemically controlled from the outside.
Just as questionable is the way that Habermas makes this system world of money and power, if not quite unassailable, then largely insulated from the subversion of class conflict and internal crisis (Habermas 1976:92). 'Habermas's contention that advanced capitalism has entirely changed the basis upon which ideology stands is not accurate.. For Habermas the novelty of advanced capitalism is the disappearance of the importance of class struggle for ideology; the truth may be on the contrary, that the ruling class has succeeded in camouflaging itself by using the nama of science' (Larrain 1979:210).
2 THE DIVISION BETWEEN SYSTEM AND LIFE WORLD
post-traditional lifeworld of the homme (the private sphere) and the citoyen (the public sphere)' (Habermas 1989:328). It is what Habermas does on this basis that is contentious.
In his Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas defines interaction in terms of the lifeworld. This is distinguished from, but nevertheless crucial to, the sphere of the state. As interactive and linguistic, Habermas's reason is always rooted in the lifeworld and the various activities of reason always comprise experiences in that world. The lifeworld grounds the procedures of communicative action. Habermas's account of freedom shows the influence of both Kant and Hegel. The participants in communicative action act according to reasons - laws - which they enact for themselves (TKH 2:310). Since the participants agree on the validity of' any utterance and hence can give reasons for agreement, any understanding reached in this manner cannot be coerced (TKH 2:185). Moreover, since participants are committed to the rational validity of utterances, they are operating independently of personal interests and aims: 'the agents involved are coordinated not through egocentric calculations of success but through acts of reaching understanding' (TCA 1991 1:285). Understanding is, therefore, uncoerced and disinterested, something distinctly Kantian, and something which savours a great deal of Rawls (1971). The participant in communicative*action is responsible for his/her acts, different forms of responsibility coordinated with different concepts of autonomy (TCA 1991 1:14).
This applies to practical discourse, where the influence of Kantian moral legislation is evident.
TKH 2:145
The difference with Kant is that Habermas's understanding is achieved dynamically through communicative action rather than statically through communal legislation. In this sense, Habermas incorporates the Hegelian notion of 'reconciliation'. This notion also savours of Adorno's notion of 'intact intersubjectivity' (TCA 1991 l:362f 373 334 391), which brought dynamism to Kant's idea of freedom. Thus, where Hegel had retreated to a metaphysics of reconciliation in attempting to formulate this principle (TCA 1991 l:336f), Habermas's communicative action gives it a rational foundation as reconciliatory self-legislation.
Habermas therefore incorporates something of the Kantian and Hegelian -and Rousseauan - notions of freedom -and can employ it as an abstract standard with which to critically examine existing society). Habermas's interactive freedom is not reason realising itself in the world and nor is it something that can be realised. But it can, in a formal sense, raise issues of the good life and ask questions of existing social practices and processes in so far as they depart from these conditions (TCA 1989 2:8 11 23 25 26/7 32/42 60/2 86 143/4 150/2 163 180/1 186 187). Thus Habermas can ask why modernisation has excluded
the erection of institutions of freedom, which protect the communicatively structured action domains in the private and public spheres from the reifying peculiar dynamic of the economic and administrative systems.
TKH 2:484
monetarisation and bureaucratisation of everyday practices in public and private spheres drives out moral-practical elements and results in pathological consequences.
Communicative action is the basis for reaching understanding in the modern world (TCA 1991 l:69f 339; 2:126/7 187 352/3 ). Habermas's structures of communicative action are grounded, not transcendentally as with Kant, but in the nature of the modern lifeworld, 'as part of a cooperative process of interpretation aiming at situation definitions that are intersubjectively recognised’ (TCA 1991 1:69/70). This grounding is sufficient since individuals cannot transcend the lifeworld, a horizon they cannot go beyond. For those belonging to a 'sociocultural lifeworld' it is 'senseless' to ask if the culture in which they understand themselves depends on something else (TKH 2:225 200f TCS 1991 1:336). |This sociocultural lifeworld exists as the necessary foundation of communicative action; the totality and its structures of this lifeworld cannot be challenged.
The lifeworld, structured by communicative rationality, is necessary, but processes for coordinating action are not all of a communicative character and do not all belong to the lifeworld. To be specific, money and administrative power as steering media, coordinate human action on nonrational/non-discursive grounds. And as these steering media assume more and more of the responsibility for coordination, the space for the lifeworld is diminished, with socially pathological consequences (TCA 1991 1:299-303; 1989 2:311/12 355/7 367/73 375 391/6).
encroachment of the system world upon the lifeworld in the context of a necessary co-existence of the two.
Nevertheless, Habermas does offer grounds for an assertion of the lifeworld in arguing that the theory of communicative action is called forth by the 'colonisation' of the lifeworld by the steering media of the system world.
Perhaps this provocative menace, a challenge that puts into question the symbolic structures of the lifeworld as a whole, can make plausible why those structures have become accessible for us.
TKH 2:592f
Habermas's theory of communicative action, as generated by the disruptions to the lifeworld, may be interpreted as the expression of a social need, a protest against the alienation of social power, the disempowerment of society, and as a demand for the restitution of this power to the social body. Though he rules out restitution, Habermas's perspective, at least, raises the question of social reappropriation centred upon the lifeworld as the necessary world for individuals.
Habermas's view of the 'necessary' character of the lifeworld to individuals possesses Aristotelian origins, Habermas himself draws a parallel between the system-life world distinction and Marx's distinction between the realms of freedom and necessity (TCA 1989 2:202 338/40). As Arendt has noted, this derives from the way that Aristotle makes familial and economic arrangements a necessary condition for the functioning of the polis (Arendt HC 1958:30f 79-135). Anderson refers to Habermas in terms of 'Neue Sittlichkeit', but this context makes plain the extent to which these attempts to define freedom take the character of a rethinking of the Aristotelian polis.
encroachment by steering media into the lifeworld certainly undermines the claim of the state to embody an overarching moral community. It is merely one form of community, for Marx an illusory form in antagonistic relation to all others. This critical appropriation of Habermas opens up the lifeworld as a sphere of emancipatory interaction to be invested with the power alienated away to the steering media of money and power, capital and the state, as alien mechanisms of control.
The state, as it emerges from Marx's critique of Hegel, is ideal and abstract in relation to social reality. This means that the emancipatory interaction that Marx envisages as a result of the practical reappropriation of social power cannot be located in the public sphere as constituted within the state. As against Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and contemporary liberals and communitarians, this interpretation of Marx cannot concede legitimacy to the activity of the political community as the foundation of all interaction. Habermas suggests an alternative in his communicative lifeworld and his possibility for the discursive coordination of human action. His resistance to colonisation by money and power can be translated into Marx's critique of the state and capital as alienated social powers instituted an alien control.
In Habermas, the space of human interaction separates the political and economic sphere, structured around the steering media of money and power, from the lifeworld, structured by communicative action. This chapter challenges this distinction and does so by pressing Habermas's demand for a society governed normatively by communicative rationality against the inevitable domination of instrumental rationality in a world governed by the state and capital. Habermas’s communicative ethic is too thin to resist or challenge the realm of alien powers, but it does open up the prospect of an ideal of a rational society centred up the lifeworld as the necessary world.
money and of the lifeworld by self-organising public spheres founded on communication. Thus Habermas defines modernisation in terms of a process of differentiation and interaction.
Capitalism and the modern state, guided by the media of money and power, become differentiated from the social mechanisms of the lifeworld, which reacts in a characteristic way. Socially integrated spheres of action within civil society crystallize into a private and public 'sphere, in opposition to the system-integrated and complementary domains of the economy and state.
Habermas TKH 1982 vol 2 471
Habermas argues that capitalist society cannot be conceptualised as a social totality given the split into differentiated realms integrated on different bases. The lifeworld is the realm of personal relationships and, ideally, of communicative action. Counterposed to the lifeworld is a system organised on the basis of nonlinguistic steering media (money and administrative power), integrating society impersonally. For Habermas, this split is permanent since there is no immanent logic of capitalism to produce its dialectical transcendence and since large scale modern society can function only with such systemic integration. Attempts to abolish such large-scale societal integration are Utopian; the reduction in large-scale can be achieved only at the expense of catastrophe (the central argument of the Theory of Communicative Action). Nevertheless, as the locus for basic human values, the lifeworld needs to be defended against the continual encroachment of the systemic forces of impersonal media (Calhoun 1992:30/1).
apparatus and the economy also represents a higher level of system differentiation' (Habermas 1989:339).
'Marx's error stems in the end from dialectically clamping together system and life world in a way that does not allow for a sufficiently sharp separation between the level of system differentiation attained in the modern period and the class specific forms in which it has been institutionalised'. Marx 'failed to see that every modern society, whatever its class structure, has to exhibit a high degree of structural differentiation' (Habermas 1989:340).
Habermas thus rules out the restitution of power from the system to the life world. The uncoupling of the system from the lifeworld is an essential condition of pluralisation. Nevertheless, Habermas notes the pathological consequences of the constant threat of the encroachment upon the lifeworld. But can this encroachment be held in check? Habermas's system world rationalises a social structure resting on alienated social forms, immunising it against normative considerations. In so doing, Habermas's view expresses the dualism of rationality. Instrumental rationality constitutes society as an objective sphere immune from subjective evaluation whilst communicative rationality constitutes society as a sphere of inter-subjectivity, free from the constraint of the pursuit of practical interests (Clarke 1991:304).
Habermas upholds a distinction between labour, in which human beings transform nature through instrumentally rational processes, and communication, in which interaction proceeds through a system of institutionalised rules. The rational society rests upon communication.
Habermas's end is a rational consensus freely reached by participants in the communication community. This consensus is formed within the sphere of civil society, and the rationality achieved is determined by the extent to which this communication reflects the freedom and equality of the interacting parties. Thus Habermas identifies the problem as the supplanting of communicative reason by instrumental reason. Habermas's thought presupposes the instrumental rationality of capitalist relations, keeping labour, production and politics safely locked up in the system world. This view leaves little of determining significance open to substantive evaluative judgement. Habermas does not question the alien forms of social labour or the alienation of political subjectivity, the very things which ensure the subjection of social existence to the domination of instrumental rationality. 'By denying that the sphere of labour is a sphere of communication in which the communicative interests of the working class are suppressed, Habermas denies the possibility of restoring the human qualities of labour to the activity of labour itself. However Marx's theory of alienated labour shows that the contrast between communicative reason and instrumental reason is not a contrast between the inherently social character of human existence and the alienated forms in which human sociability is expressed' (Clarke 1991:322/3).
economy and the state. Modern society also develops socially integrated 'lifeworld' institutions, specialising in symbolic reproduction: the 'private sphere', and the 'public sphere' as a sphere of political deliberation (Fraser in Polity Reader 1995:205).
But the question to be asked is whether human action contexts can be coordinated consensually and normatively given the tendency of the system world to encroach upon the life world. Given, that is, the alienation of social power. Habermas, arguably, has undermined his own vision of a normative democratic community by denying that power can be restituted from the system world.
Habermas refers to the invasion of local cultures, communities and habits by more abstracted and centralised forms of social and economic organisation as 'the colonisation of the lifeworld'. Economic and administrative systems are no longer subordinated to the norms and values of everyday life but, instead, come to penetrate the lifeworld's internal dynamics. The invasion of system-integration mechanisms into social-integration spheres results in the 'desiccation of communicative contexts' and the 'depletion of the non-renewable cultural resources'. Thus, symbolic reproduction is destabilized, personal and collective identities are threatened, and new forms of social conflict develop at the 'seam of system and lifeworld'. These conflicts respond to crisis tendencies in symbolic rather than material reproduction; and they contest reification and 'the grammar of forms of life' as opposed to distribution or inequality (Fraser in Polity Reader 1995:207/5).! In other words, Habermas's vision of the ideal communication community is seriously vitiated by the division he upholds between the system and life world.
3 IDEAL COMMUNICATION COMMUNITY
1991:131). This certainly raises normative questions concerning the possible future society. Habermas puts forward the ideal community of domination free communication. Reasonable speech is posited as the organising principle of societised humanity.
The ideal speech situation, characterised by pure intersubjectivity, that is, the absence of barriers blocking the process of communication, presupposes symmetrical as against asymmetrical relations. Moreover, barriers to be removed involve constraints produced within the structure of communication. Habermas thus proceeds: 'the structure of communication itself produces no constraints if and only if, for all possible participants, there is a symmetrical distribution of chances to choose and to apply speech acts' (Habermas quoted in Thompson 1984:264). The assumption of symmetry forms the general framework of the ideal speech situation. Symmetry in the distribution of chances means equality in the opportunity of all potential participants to take part in discussion. The speech situation is ideal and does not necessarily correspond with empirical conditions of speech acts. 'Nevertheless it belongs to the structure of possible speech that in the execution of speech acts (and actions) as counterfactually proceed as if the ideal speech situation . . were not merely fictive but real - precisely what we call presupposition’ (Habermas in Thompson 1984:266). The normative aspects of this, as a possible, society, are radical and democratic. Habermas' view possesses implications and possibilities which need to be explored in terms of the pursuit of the good society. Habermas stands in the line of the tradition of political philosophy which seeks to rest human affairs on reason as against coercion. The ideal communication community is the realisation of democracy as a society governed by discursive will formation. The notion of individuals as equally reasonable beings subverts relationships of subordination and superordination. The idea of domination free communication demands that relationships in wider society be domination free and that the unequal distribution of power end.
questions of power and control in rel ation to the goods and people of society in the process of value discussions.
Through the notion of the ‘suppression of generalisable interests’ Habermas is able to distinguish norms based on a rational consensus from those norms that merely stabilize relations of force (1976:111).
Every particular speech act invokes an ideal speech situation where a rational consensus is achieved without the use or force or deception, arid where the opportunity and the means to participate in the communicative process are available to all.
It is the achievement of mutual understanding by a communication community of citizens, their own words, that brings about the binding consensus.
Habermas 1989:82
In this ideal speech situation a consensus can be achieved through the :force of the better argument: as opposed to constraint and power
(Miller 1967:75). The ideal speech situation thus offers a model with which to critically evaluate the reality of existing power divided or exploitative society (Polity Reader 1995:129/30) . There is a vision of an alternate social order implicit in the view of the ideal communication community. However distorted a particular act of communication, it always contains a transcendent moment pertaining to a radically egalitarian and free society. This thesis seeks to relate this vision of an alternate future to Marx's own relation to the tradition of rational freedom, showing another possible mode of development.
that depends for its survival on the structures of linguistic communication and cooperative, purposive-rational action must of necessity rely on reason’ (Habermas in Dews ed Autonomy and Solidarity 1986:51 quoted in Eagleton 1991:131/2). Collective social life is inconceivable without the moral and political knowledge obtained in practical communication.
The participants in the communication community engage in discursive activity as equally reasonable beings performing equal speech acts - the 'ideal speech situation'. Habermas is attempting to avoid a situation in which participants exercise power over each other in a context of asymmetrical relationships of subordination and superordination. This is a critical tool in evaluating social reality. Individuals within the hierarchical division of labour, and within the institutions which codify it, are unable to perform the same speech acts. Within asymmetrical relationships some hold power over others. It follows that Habermas's ideal is possible only if society moves beyond relations of dependency structured by asymmetrical relations of power. Heller is alert to the radical possibilities. 'A unitary humanity as a reality and not merely as an idea, as a community of the unity of mutual understanding and mutually supporting different forms of life, which all continually remove conflicts of interest between them: that is a radical need. It exists as a need, but it cannot be satisfied within a society constituted by relationships of subordination and superordination and conflicts of interest, within a society of which the dynamic is determined by conflicts of interest.1 (Heller 1984:1.38).
The notion of the ideal communication community carries with it strong evaluative overtones. Habermas's theory of communicative action, affirming the notion of an ‘ideal speech situation’ (Habermas 1984 I) is committed to a social order which sustains a genuinely autonomous public sphere’ of debate which proceeds with the object of attaining an uncoerced rational agreement. This ideal is implicit in every act of communicative exchange.
which to govern the world. Kant made people conscious of their right and duty to think for themselves.
Individuals socialised as members of an ideal communication community acquire an identity with both universalising one particularising aspects. On the one hand, individuals learn to orient themselves within a universalistic framework, that is, to act autonomously. On the other hand, they learn to use this autonomy, which makes them equal to every other morally acting subject, to develop themselves in their subjectivity and singularity, membership of this ideal communication community is, in Hegelian terms, constitutive of both the I as universal and the I as individual. (Habermas 1973:l42ff; Habermas 1989:97).
4 THE LIMITATIONS OF HABERMAS’S COMMUNICATIVE RATIONALITY
Habermas's claims are pitched at the highest level of abstract generality, which does nothing to overcome the abstract character of liberal morality. What is required is a new morality that is embedded in social relations and practices and which is therefore able to better comprehend detailed everyday practicalities and the essentially contingent character of real-life ethical choice.
This criticism is distinct from post-structuralist or postmodernist thinkers who accuse Habermas of offering a version of the old Enlightenment paradigm, imposing some ‘grand narrative’ through some faith in reason or truth supporting its own, self-validating claims (sea Norris on the various claims and counter-claims, 1985:19/46).
The problem is that Habermas himself gives grounds for believing in the ultimate triumph of instrumental rationality. He considers ‘systematically distorted communication’ as tending to expand, eroding the sphere of communicative rationality in the process.
Habermas accepts too readily the dominance of the instrumental rationalisation through which human activities and relationships have bean emptied of normative significance as they come to be subordinated to ends which are extrinsic to them. Habermas explicitly concedes labour to the logic of instrumental reason, and implicitly concedes other human activities as well. Heller criticises Habermas for ignoring the 'anthropological meaning of work' (Heller in Thompson and Held ed 1982:34) in providing a purely instrumental account of production. As a result, these are no longer available to enter into the construction of a morality. Habermas leaves society divided between two forms of rationality, with no good reason to think that communicative rationality could resist the seemingly inexorable tendency of instrumental rationality to colonise the lifeworld.
on the strict demarcation of system and life world and the displacement of labour in favour of a communicative ethic, the normative principle of ‘free and unconstrained dialogue among reasoning individuals’ is left rootless, lacking any basis either in appropriate institutions or in the lifeworld (Benhabib in Calhoun 1992:88) .
There is a problem with Habermas's ideal in that language can involve misunderstanding as much as understanding. Indeed, Marx's critical conception of ideology recognises the way that language systematically conceals relations of power. Communicative activity is too implicated in social relationships of domination and exploitation to make Habermas' ideal of anything more than of regulative significance.
5 CONSENSUS, RATIONALITY AND DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY
The discussion of Habermas offers a way of demonstrating Marx's relevance to contemporary debates concerning modernity.' Advocates of a radical individualism or a radical democracy are prone to dismiss Marx as tied to a nineteenth century capitalist model of politics. Habermas is more sympathetic in reformulating the philosophical underpinning of Hegel and Marx, rooted in the discourse of subjectivity (PDM 1990), finding in it a deficit of modernity deriving from a lingering holism or attainment to a metaphysics or subjectivity (Geist or labour). As a solution to this deficit, Habermas theorises a process of communicative interaction entailing a quasi-contractual agreement among participants. One can affirm Habermas' insights, especially when relating possibilities for deliberative democracy overcoming systemic coercion to Rousseau, but his solution is open to criticism for subverting the mediating balance between individual and community. Habermas, that is, succumbs to individualism of the modern world. What is neglected is Marx and Hegel as both theorists and critics of modernity, grasping the role of modernity in extending individual freedom in dialectical fashion whilst also showing an awareness of how modernity rests upon a diremption which undermines well being and the good life. Individual emancipation attains a negative freedom but fails to ground a complete freedom. Hegel's point against Rousseau was not that he was radical but that he was not radical enough (Fine in Bonefeld et al). His individualism resulted in a failure to ground freedom positively in an institutional and social context. This is an insight which derives not from nostalgia but from a critical attempt to accentuate the inherent emancipatory potential of modernity.
rationality but the way that alienation subverts rationality through the radical separation of human actors from the results of their actions (Clarke 1991:325).
Habermas criticises Marx for his tendency to reduce interaction to production. The abolition of oppression requires more than the common control of the means of production (Habermas Towards a Rational Society 1970:81-122; Theory and Practice 1973:195-282; Knowledge and Human Interests 1968:43-60). Interaction needs to be freed in a broader sense.
For Aristotle, human interaction is governed by the polis. But here one notes how Marx's emancipatory interaction is subversive of constituted political authority. Neither the polis nor the state, as invested with ethical meaning in themselves, can be reconciled with the emancipatory interaction of individuals organising in society. Hence the different approaches of Hegel and Marx in relation to the state on the question of freedom. This shows an interesting aspect of Habermas's formulation of the lifeworld as a domain of interaction distinct from, in some ways antithetical to and potentially subversive of the state.
Habermas's ideal communication community cannot be dismissed as a Utopian ideal. It bears a striking resemblance to politics in the classical polis. Habermas's ideal of 'unconstrained discourse' rests political participation upon a linguistic basis. His views, therefore, have some bearing upon contemporary discussions of realising socialism as deliberative democracy (Paul, Miller, Paul 1989). The attempt to replace coercion with reason in politics also bears striking resemblance to Rousseau.
Communication is abstraction from these relationships is denuded of its social content.
How possible it is to abstract discourse from social relationships has to be doubted. Language, as Marx well understood, implies not merely consensus but conflict. Indeed, in so far as ideology is a body of ideas which systematically conceals the power and interests of the dominant class, 'consensus’ in abstraction from social relationships suggests something of an ideological project. In this context, dissensus cannot simply be regarded as the result of 'systematically distorted communication' but expresses the asymmetrical relations of power in a class divided society.
Habermas's ideal communication community is a worthy ambition but takes something of a character of the left Hegelian attempt to realise philosophy independently of transformative praxis making the world rational. To this extent, Habermas overestimates the power of reason in creating the emancipated society and forming its content. This view affirms the power of rationality in generating self-understanding so that social existence can be ordered to articulate the demand for freedom. But this fails to address the problem of how the demands of universal rationality apply in real situations in a world of a structured coercion. What is absent from Habermas's rational project is a broad conception of constitutive human praxis.
Without some conception of interaction as wider than communication, the ideal communication community, like the left Hegelian 'realisation of philosophy’ (Callinicos 1985), will remain an impotent ideal.
society takes the form of the dissolution of the system into the lifeworld; in the process, Marx dissolves the whole abstract institutional-legal apparatus raised over society as rational freedom took a legal form as a necessary counterpart of capitalism.
Habermas's ideal communication community offers an insightful counterpoint to this reading, especially in the way that he too builds upon the 'rational' tradition. Nevertheless, Marx will be considered to articulate a radically heterogeneous conception of human activity beyond merely communication. Habermas's ideal communication community, resting upon the possibility of an overall consensus between participants, is a questionable goal from the perspective of a genuine pluralism of modes of life. Such a notion raises the question of the public sphere and how a multifaceted ‘proletarian’ form contrasts to the unitary bourgeois conception institutionalised in the form of the state.
6 THE PUBLIC SPHERE
In the name of democracy, Ranciere argues against a project such as Habermas's. 'Democracy cannot be redeemed by philosophy. And it is most certainly farcical to posit its dialogic redemption through discussion of the more and the less or the weighing of interests in the balance. Imparity is an essential part of democracy. The only kind of dialogue compatible with democracy is one where the parties hear one another but do not agree with one another'. Democracy, in Ranciere's view, has nothing to do with the search for community, especially not the fairytale which clothes the debating of common interests in the garb of philosophical dialogue' (Ranciere 1995:102). Democracy is not the formation of a common will; its dialogue 'is that of a divided community': 'Not that it is indifferent to the universal, but in politics the universal is always subject to dispute. The political wrong does not get righted. It is addressed as something irreconcilable within a community that is always unstable and heterogeneous' (Ranciere 1995:103).
sphere or spheres in the plural as against the unitary bourgeois conception.
An important feature of this discussion is the widening of the spaces for popular participation so that progressively larger spheres of life are subject to the discursive coordination of citizen interaction. This does not entail the formation or imposition of a common will in an ideal community but creates a differentiated politics which connects with the universal.
Habermas's account of the conditions of democratic politics (TCA II, esp ch 8) puts the debate within more material terms. Given that, in Habermas's view, large scale, complex societies cannot operate without markets and administrative bureaucracies, the democratic ideal aims to subordinate these to the control of the will of the people as formed in open and public debate. However, Habermas does not believe that this can be achieved within the formal organisations of the economy and the state, or even within formally organised parties, interest and pressure groups. Habermas instead locates the formation of the rational collective will outside of all formal organisations (McCarthy 1991 ch 8). In this analysis, the core of the democratised public sphere is formed by the multiplicity of spontaneously formed publics engaged in informal discussions of issues of public interest.
Habermas welcomes the heightened pluralism of all forms of life, emphasising the extent to which modernity is characterised by differentiation, individuation, and bifurcation. With sociostructural differentiation and independent value spheres, modernity contains possibilities for the consensual generation of general norms of action through practical discourses and for the reflexive and critical formation of individual identity.
These possibilities allow Habermas to conceive of the extension of political participation through the widest reaching democratisation of decision-making processes.
modernity and its achievements. Habermas's view has none of the hostility towards the institutions of modern society that others in the tradition of civic virtue (e.g. Arendt) have displayed. In the republican tradition, virtue and commerce ara generally considered to be antithetical principles (Pocock, 1975 1985). One of the merits of Habermas's theory lies in the attempt to secure the relevance of civic virtue in modern conditions. To this end, Habermas extends the meaning of participation beyond the exclusive focus on political-institutional context to embrace the more inclusively conceived form of discursive will formation. Participation’ is thus not limited to being an activity that takes place in a narrowly defined political sphere but as something that is realised in the social and cultural spheres as well (Benhabib in Calhoun 1992:85/6).
The significance of Habermas's evaluation of the public sphere lies in its potential as a mode of societal integration. Public discourse and communicative action offer an alternative mode of coordination of human life to state power and market economics as non-discursive modes of coordination. Habermas values the bourgeois public sphere for institutionalising not merely a set of interests but a practice of rational-critical discourse on political matters.
The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public.
ST 1989:27
The bourgeois public sphere institutionalised a form of rational-critical discourse concerning issues of common concern which opened up possibilities of a rational approach to the world (Calhoun 1992:13/4).
Habermas 1989:319
Habermas's conceptual formulation of ‘the public sphere’ designates a space in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of discourse. This exists as an institutionalised arena of discursive interaction in which citizens engage in debate about common affairs. Importantly,- this arena is distinct from the state and from the economy. Habermas's 'public sphere', then, is not an arena of political or market relations but of discursive relations. This enables us to distinguish between the apparatuses of the state, on the one hand, and public arenas of citizen discourse and association, on the other. Such a nuanced view removes the facile equation of state control of the economy with the control of the socialist citizenry. Distinguishing the state apparatus from the public sphere of discourse and association prevents socialism being institutionalised in an authoritarian-statist form. It enables the conception of the abolition of the state to be accompanied by the extension of public spaces in a participatory-democratic form. The result is to redefine the idea of socialist democracy (Fraser in Calhoun 1992:109/10).
The problem with Habermas's model of the public sphere is that it too closely follows its historical bourgeois character. What is required is a new, postbourgeois model that is able to I accommodate a multiplicity of interests and identities and, crucially, is connected to the sphere of social labour and individual relationships in the lifeworld in a more direct sense than Habermas's communicative model is able to achieve.
proletarian public sphere resting upon social versus alien control, something which enables individuals to participate in the determination of their common affairs (Hohendahl in Calhoun 1992:99/100).
The model of a self-governing society derived from Marx (via Hegel) presented in this thesis departs considerably from Habermas in several key areas. Marx's project of practical reappropriation of social power suggests that all spheres of social life be transformed into democratic constituencies within civil society. Habermas's exclusion of economic and governmental institutions issues in a very thin communicative ethic which underestimates the communicative significance of politics and production in people's lives.
A number of competing counterpublics existed alongside the bourgeois public - nationalist publics, popular peasant publics, elite women's publics, and working class publics (Eley, in Calhoun 1992; Gayatri Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Nelson and Grossberg 1988:271/313; counterpublic comes from Felski 1989; Eraser in Calhoun 1993.: 123). (Given the conflictual relations of these counterpublics to the bourgeois public sphere it can no longer be assumed that the bourgeois conception embodies an unrealised ideal (Fraser in Calhoun 1991:116/7). This certainly puts a question mark against the notion that reclaiming the public sphere is equivalent to realising the kernel of truth in the ideology of the bourgeois public sphere (Calhoun 1992:27/8).
The existence of various counterpublics indicates the possibility of multiple public spheres. In arguing that Habermas's public sphere conforms coo closely to the liberal bourgeois model one notes how Habermas's tendency to dichotomize public and private corresponds to the similar dichotomy between state and civil society. The assumption that there is just one public for each state derives from this dichotomy (Calhoun 1992:36/7).
public sphere. Melucci introduces the notion of 'post-industrial' democracy as a 'democracy of everyday life' in terms of the consolidation of independent public spaces which render visible the demands of social movements (Melucci 1988:259). It seems more productive, however, to relate Marx's attempt to overcome the conflictual relations between these publics to the possibility of a multilayered social fabric sustained by a welter of democratic intermediary institutions and powers.
7 TOWARDS, THE PROLETARIAN PUBLIC SPHERE
For Donald Sassoon, the socialist tradition has persistently neglected the character of the state. Socialist parties have failed to imagine the political forms of the state, authority and the public sphere beyond the conventional terms of parliamentary government (1996:126f). Expanding the conception of citizenship to extend democracy or explore extra- parliamentary forms has not been seriously entertained. The socialist transformation of politics never happened, 'a tragic case of arrested development’ (Yeo in Levy ed 1987:245).'As Sassoon says, for a tradition emphasizing above all the political governing of the economy, this failure to think creatively about political order is a terrible weakness’ (Eley NLR 227 Jan/Feb 1998:111). And it is a weakness that can be remedied by a conception of the communist public sphere as derived from Marx's transformation of the state-civil society dualism, his revaluing of the associative character of civil society generally and the proletariat in particular.
This thesis began with postmarxist democratic theory, with particular emphasis upon the necessity of the institutional separation of the state from civil society as a condition for democracy in both spheres. This necessity was questioned. The theories for democratisation have been found wanting in their limited conception of democracy, in their inability to extend democratisation by getting to the roots of alienated systems of control, and in their consequent inability to get beyond the 'bourgeois' dualisms and separations that deny democracy.
the state from civil society. The democratic claims of the liberal order can be sustained only by insulating the political sphere, narrowly identified with the state and its institutions, from what are defined as 'nonpolitical' processes within civil society. The task facing liberals is thus how to institute barriers separating the political institutions which claim to embody free, equal and democratic relations from a sociostructural reality resting organised around asymmetrical relations of power (Walzer, 1983). Marx's claim is that the possibility of a public sphere embodying values of freedom, equality and democracy requires that the liberal autonomy of the political from social inequality be overcome and, with it, the institutional separation of the political and the social.
Fraser rejects the idea that a functioning democratic public sphere requires a sharp separation between civil society and the state. On the contrary, forms of self-management and interpublic coordination can only be adequately constituted when the line separating civil society and the state is blurred. Fraser shows how the insistence upon institutional separation is related to the classical conception of limited government defending a privately ordered, capitalist economy (Fraser in Calhoun 1991:). The sense of associational space is present in Fraser's awareness that, if civil society is understood in terms of public associations, rather than undermining democracy, as the likes of Keane, Heller and Held claim, the overcoming of the line separating state and civil society actually represents a democratic advance (in Calhoun 1991:173; Fraser in Calhoun 1991:133/4).
from Hegel and Marx. This differentiated system of democratic self-representation thus emerges as a system of interpublic coordination.
Fraser is forthright on this insistence on institutional separation: 'any conception of the public sphere that requires a sharp separation between (associational) civil society and the state will be unable to imagine the forms of self-management, interpublic coordination, and political accountability that are essential to a democratic and egalitarian society... What is needed, rather, is a postbourgeois conception that can permit us to envision a greater role for (at least some) public spheres than mere autonomous opinion formation removed from authoritative decision making' (Fraser in Calhoun 1991:136).
From this perspective, the argument for 'double democratisation' is problematical. For the separation of the state from civil society is associated with the alienation of control which itself denies participation in common affairs. The failure to confront and abolish the state and capital as interdependent alienated social powers means that the whole project of double democratisation operates within realms which are alienated and anti-democratic spheres of external control. The chapter has not, however, taken a negative towards those who are concerned to recover the centrality of democracy in the project of the left. The work of the postmarxist democratic theories is considered to contain a number of positive features, taking up issues which the 'classical' marxist tradition either suppressed or failed to develop. Particularly important is the need to revalue civil society as a sphere that is something other than economics and class struggle. This opens up an appreciation of Marx's wider definition of praxis entails a multidimensionality of power embodied in social and political forms. In addition to this is the need to develop a conception of 'the political' in future communist society, suggesting the notion of a socialist public sphere as a counterpoint to state socialism.
procedural and institutional forms that a pluralist and democratic society should take. That the various 'postmarxist' positions have been found wanting in a number of respects does not extinguish the central point that there is a need to show how, for Marx, substantive freedom and democracy, and, indeed social pluralism, need to be grounded. In relation to Trotsky and Luxemburg, Geras defines a marxist pluralism as 'a Marxist conception of working class democracy allowing for points of view other than one's own' (Geras 1986:206). This thesis proposes to examine Marx's writings for evidence of a communist public sphere/s based upon the control by the individuals and groups constituting the demos of the multiplicity of their forms. Praxis as entailing a multifaceted conception of power, active citizenship embodied in relationships and resting upon a notion of functional representation and social control by self-mediating social individuals show the possibility for a multiplex democracy in Marx.
Marxists have traditionally assigned the role of proletarian representation to the revolutionary party. Marx's approach was much more flexible in taking in conciliar forms of organisation (Miliband 1977:131/3) and having a broad notion of 'party' that may encompass a plurality of organisations (Geras 1986:209/10). Marx, moreover, recognised the need for the formation of blocs and alliances as an important aspect of revolutionary struggle, forging organic links with a wide range of mass movements pushing for social and democratic reform (Gilbert 1981:131 201 256; Draper 1978 vol II 38/9 358ff 405).
The libertarian character of Marx's Gemeinwesen is contrasted with the use of community in nostalgic German thought, in Durkheim and in recent communitarian theories. The twin themes of self-constituting power and communist individuality are combined to interpret Marx's political writings as a consistent attack upon power abstracted from the community and as a demand for the relocation of that power in a self-governing society. Community will be considered as Marx's alternative of a self- regulating social order to the external regulation and 'illusory' or abstract communities of the state and capital. The question of mediation is taken up again in an analysis of Marx's idealisation of the Paris Commune which is concerned to extract principles of self-mediation. In developing the ascending theme of power against the state alienated social power are The Class Struggles in France, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and The Civil War in France. In exploring the potentials for participatory democracy in these writings, (the view of Marx that emerges is of a theorist of a radically novel conception of government, one that pushes beyond centralising and bureaucratising modern forms to a socialised politics powered from below.
Marx's abolition of the public-private divide in favour of commune democracy may be defined in terms of a socialist public sphere. Marx's view can be related to contemporary attempts to rework and rethink the public sphere. Fraser 'argues for a multi-sectored public sphere that would replace the unitary concept of the public that dominates our political life'. Fraser argues that in the present situation, different voices ape filtered through a unitary public sphere as a single lens. But since this lens cannot be neutral, there is a need for multiple publics so that all groups, with their plurality of values and rhetorics can be heard.
creation of public spheres independent of the institutions of government, the party system and the state (Melucci in Keane ed CSS 1988:258). These public spaces render questions raised by social movements visible and collective. They enable movements to avoid being institutionalised and thus exist as a vital condition of post industrial democracy. But such a view maintains dualism in that it looks to establish autonomous public spheres outside of a still existing state sphere, the official public sphere. Marx's view implies the realisation of public spheres through the reappropriation of power from the unitary public sphere of the state.
Nancy Fraser's notion of a multi-sectored public sphere is intended to replace the unitary concept of the public which dominates modern bourgeois politics. This is certainly consistent with the view of Marx as upholding a multi-faceted definition of power and its plural forms, the view that Marx is committed to opening up public spaces (Nancy Fraser in Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory 1989; Nancy Fraser 'Rethinking the Public Sphere’ in Cra ig Calho un ed, Habe rm as and th e Publi c Sphe re 1992:109/42). It is in this context that one can refer to the notion of the 'proletarian public’. This is 'characterised by its direct, sensual and collective mode of experience' in contradistinction to the 'mediated, intellectual, mode of the bourgeois’, a 'public grounded in the process of production’ as distinct from the bourgeois separation of public and private spheres (O Negt and A Kluge quoted in H Medick, 'Plebeian culture in the transition to capitalism' in R Samual and G Stedman Jones (eds), Culture, Ideology and Politics 1982:87).
'dialogic neutrality' which presumes the rightful coexistence of different conceptions of the good (Ackerman SJLS 1980:11; Bellamy 1992:218).
One sees in Ackerman the intellectualised, abstracted and mediated bourgeois public sphere criticised by Negt and Kluge. Ackerman's liberal model conceives political relations in juridical terms. Thus the just is neutral in relation to conflicting views of the good expresses a neutrality that is a cornerstone of the modern legal system. However, as Benhabib points out, politics concerns more than neutrality. ‘Democratic politics challenges, redefines, and renegotiates the divisions between the good and the just, the moral and the legal, the private and the public’ (Benhabib in Calhoun 1992:83).
In distinguishing between old and new forms or modes of thought, action and organisation, the work of Offe on new social movements is useful. The political paradigm created by the new social movements is associated with 'dialogical' forms whereas the political paradigm of industrial capitalist society -which comprises 'socialism' - is associated with monological forms. Of course those who, like Offe, are theorising the new politics represented by the new social movements would reject the identification of dialogical forms with a 'proletarian' politics. A marxist, concerned with the emancipatory project of abolishing the state and capital, would, however, repudiate the identification of 'proletarian' forms with the bourgeois modes of thought, action and organisation represented by the political parties and the trade unions. Such forms, it may be argued, correspond to the classical bourgeois separation of the political and the economic rather than attempt to overcome that diremption at the level of the social.
subject to the decisions in the decision making process. Power is something which is exercised from the bottom upwards through the rank and file.
The old 'bourgeois' paradigm was concerned with the process of accumulation, distribution of material resources, institutionalisation of interests groups and mediation of class conflict, and instituted mechanisms of collective bargaining and party competition. The new paradigm -whether one identifies it with the nsm or the proletariat - presupposes the emancipation of the life world of individuals from this institutional/systemic world in which control is alienated from individuals. Unfortunately, socialism as an organised political movement was inextricably involved in the very world it sought to transcend, hence its identification with the old monological or 'bourgeois' forms. However, understood in terms of Marx's original emancipatory project of abolishing the alien control of the state and capital, the proletarian modes of thought, action and organisation may indeed be depicted as 'dialogical'. So, reworking Offers analysis, one can produce a
schema that differentiates between the political paradigms in conflict.
MONOLOGICAL/ 'BOURGEOIS’
DIALOGICAL/ 'PROLETARIAN'
OBJECTIVES Quantitative gains Qualitative changes
MODES OF ACTION Centralizing and
bureaucratizing
Decentralizing and
democratising
RELATIONS OF
REPRESENTATION
for the constituents Leadership by constituents
DISCOURSE instrumental rationality substantive rationality
[From Offe, C 'New Social Movements': Challenging the Boundaries of Institutional Polities', Social Research, 52 (4), 817-68 in Bagguley, P, From Protest to Acquiescence? 1991].
The development of substantive democracy requires new forms of organisation. . Marx's emphasis upon proletarian self-emancipation accommodates a multiplicity of forms councils, communes, unions etc -against the notion of a 'monolithic’ party of a unified class (Miliband 1977:ch V), a view which so obviously corresponds to the notion of a single public sphere.
What Marx writes on proletarian self-emancipation and commune democracy must be associated with the restitution of state power to the social body. Among the most important principles concerning 'active' citizenship that one discerns in Marx - and before him Hegel - is that of functional representation, implying the maximum possible decentralisation compatible with a unified, coordinated political strategy. One traces this theme throughout Marx's works to the notion of commune democracy in The Civil War in France. This argument can be expressed in terms of the need to replace bourgeois indirect representation with proletarian direct representation. But there is something misleading about the notion of a specifically 'proletarian' public sphere. Not only does it seem to rest upon an exclusive identity, denying social pluralism, but it ignores Marx's concern that the proletariat dissolve itself into a universal humanity. An active citizenship embodied in individual relationships, the conception of On the Jewish Question, captures the more pluralist and popular dimension as class identity is dissolved into a truly human society of free individuals.
In discussing the question of political structure Marcuse writes of 'direct democracy' (Marcuse Essay on Liberation 69n), invoking the experience of the workers' councils of the early twentieth century and the Paris Commune. Marcuse's structure is the heir of Rousseau's Social Contract, 'with all of its difficulties concerning the preconditions of the general will and the relationship between lawgivers and people’ (Kettler in de Crespigny and Minogue ed 1975:43).
These views are to be compared with Arendt and her attempt to define authority in terms of a relationship between equals (Arendt 1958). Both are to be compared with Rousseau. Rousseau also began with the rejection of the view that the community is divided between those who command and those who obey. In Rousseau, this led to a rejection of rejection of representative government as incompatible with freedom in favour of a form of association which offered individuals the benefits of government whilst leaving them as free as before (in de Crespigny and Minogue ed 1975:233). Arendt too criticises representative government for its failure to open channels for the meaningful exercise of freedom (Arendt in 0 Sullivan in de Crespigny and Minogue ed 1975:233). Offering only a negative and protective freedom, representative government confines individuals to the private realm (Arendt 1963). Arendt may also be compared to Rousseau in her concern to develop the institutional means for an active and continuous consent (Arendt 1963; O Sullivan in de Crespigny and Minogue ed 1975:233/4). To this end Arendt revalues the consiliar experience of Jeffersonian township democracy, the Commune, the Soviets of 1905 and 1917 and of the Hungarian revolution of 1956, proposing a federal system to break up modern mass society and the centralised state (Arendt OR 1963:265/6 283).
things within its compass become objects of consumption (Arendt 1958:38; see the critique in Calhoun ed).
But as O Sullivan notes, Arendt's ideal of the virtuous republic, 'committed to willing the common good untainted by any regard for private interest', is not novel and 'lead inexorably to the autocratic systems of government which Arendt abhors' (O Sullivan in de Crespigny and Minogue ed 1975:251). The argument returns to the dilemmas of the French Revolution in attempting to apply Rousseau.
Marx's ethico-rational community is inherently democratised and democratic in that its reality is the demos itself. The organic totality, in other words, is open and immanent in its continuous creation, a subjectivised social totality which rests upon an active democracy in which politics is incorporated in social relationships. The realisation of the ethico-rational community is constituted by the active sovereignty of the demos, this sovereignty remaining active and creative, overcoming the separation of the state from civil society at the level of the demos/social as against the abstracted-institutional level. Marx: looks to transcend the economism/determinism of a civil society subject to the systemic and structural control of capital so as to grasp the ethical-political aspect within itself.
The question of how the proletarian public is to be constituted is a central theme of this thesis and is specifically related to Marx's stress upon proletarian self-emancipation and the way that associational self-activity and self-organisation not only constitutes the class subject but also the new society. Particularly important in this regard is the dictatorship of the proletariat and its relation to commune democracy.
ruthless exactions of bourgeois society and to improve their working and living conditions, but also to educate themselves and raise their general level of culture. Their struggle to wrest an element* of human dignity was a feature of the young labour movement that struck all objective observers (Marx 'Inaugural Address' in FI 1974). Nor did it disappear - on the contrary - with the conversion of small self-defence groupings into mass organisations' (Mandel 1992:61).
But this is more than a class issue in Marx. Indeed, such activity is to issue in the classless society, realising citizen democracy as a genuinely inclusive category. Gilbert refers to Marx's democratic internationalism to indicate how broad Marx's vision was. The end is an international public. Through internationalism, the workers would realise the social and political universality or species being that Marx had critically appropriated from Feuerbach and Hegel. Whereas ancient and modern republic conceptions had located citizenship within local and national boundaries, Marx sought a much expanded public space which transcended national boundaries. For Marx, communism seeks to forge a social republic citizenship and a political association on an international scale (Gilbert 1981:151/2). Marx opposed a limited citizenship within a national republic and sought international links.
The development of a theory of a communist public sphere/s responds to the criticism that since Marx is silent on how freedom would be institutionalized under communism the status of 'the political' is at best unclear in Marx (Held 1987:151/4 also Pierson 1986; McLennan 1989). '[T]he spontaneous self-organisation of the people, as described by Rousseau, appears to be sufficient’, remarks Habermas (in Blackburn ed
