3.7 - Lohmann, Georg - Marx' Capital and The Question of Normative Standards (EN)

Marx'CapitalandtheQuestionofNormativeStandards
Marx'CapitalandtheQuestionofNormativeStandards
byGeorgLohmann

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Source: PRAXISInternational(PRAXISInternational),issue:3/1986,pages:353372,onwww.ceeol.com.
MARXS CAPITAL AND THE QUESTION OF NORMATIVE STANDARDS

Georg Lohmann Jrgen Habermas has called the Marxian critique of political economy a theory of capitalist development1 which fits into historical materialism as a subtheory. Historical materialism is conceived by him primarily as a theory of social evolution and delimited from other competing interpretations, which view it as a philosophy of history or as the narrative presentation of history with systematic intent. Habermass classification makes certain assumptions about the possible relation between the two theories: in particular it makes a decision about the critical claim of Marxian theory. This is the concern of the present study. Can a theory of social evolution still fulfill the critical intentions of Marxs Capital if it incorporates the latter as a subtheory? As far as I can see, Habermas has two main reasons for diverting theoretical-reconstructive efforts away from critique toward the frame of reference of historical materialism. First he considers an immanent critique of bourgeois society to be futile due to the cynicism of the legitimating value-system in these societies.2 Second, Habermas considers an evolutionary specification of the object of critique to be a necessary precondition for its work, if the evolutionarily-oriented analysis of the present does not wish to proceed dogmatically, and define the adaptation and stabilization potentials of its object pre-critically.3 These reasons remain, even after the following comments, strong grounds that could orient a reconstruction of Marxian theory in the direction suggested by Habermas. Moreover, with this interpretation Habermas can more readily assert continuity between his efforts and those common to the reception-history of Marxian theory. For in this history historical materialism has generally been understood as a universal theory of evolution, presupposed to provide the material framework for the critique of political economy, grounding or ensuring the autodynamic dialectic of history and its revolutionary certainty. Nonetheless, in the present article a different starting point for the reconstruction of Marxian theory will be chosen, for it has not yet been decided which system the critique of political economy follows, what its critical intention is, and whether (and how) it extends into historical materialism. In contrast to Habermas, for the purpose of this investigation the implication-relationship is reversed: the critique of political economy leads into historical materialism which is not a presupposed framework but which first can be developed through critique and remains within the horizon of critique. Only by losing its critical intention can historical materialism be established as a separate universal theory of evolution. Furthermore, only after the difficulties of an historical diagnosis of society that stays within the
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bounds of critique have become clear can the merits of the various reconstruction strategies be judged. The following comments therefore will attempt to reconstruct the basic features of the critique of political economy. In conclusion I return to the relation between these two strategies of reconstruction. Let me first state two programmatic theses on the systematic structure of Marxs Capital: My first interpretive thesis reads: The systematic structure of Capital follows entirely the program of an immanent critique of the Lockean natural right based self-understanding of bourgeois society. The second thesis reads: In the execution of the task another critique is developed which transcends the natural-right framework and whose normative standard is implicit in the historiographie passages of Capital.4 Only the specific relation between these two types of critique defines the systematic complex of the critique of political economy. Accordingly this is critique through and through, i.e. any interpretation which seeks to derive from it a positive theory (e.g. descriptive economics) or understands it as such, is bound to be wrong. After briefly recalling Marxs methodological approach of a critical exposition (Darstellung) I would like to explain these two theses from a perspective internal to Marx. I then reconstruct them more extensively with the aid of post-Marxian concepts, using terms such as system and lifeworld and social- and system-integration developed in contemporary social theory. I. Immanent and Transcendent Criti of a Critical Presentation (Darstellung) With his methodical program of exposing the system of bourgeois economy, which seeks at the same time to be a critique of what it describes, Marx bases himself on Hegels procedure in The Science of Logic.5 However, compared with Hegel he changes the point of departure: exposition and critique focus on the same object, which they both evaluate negatively. During the immanent critique Marx succeeds in forging the programmatic unity of critique and exposition, whereas transcendent critique breaks this unity apart. Thus, in the following I will distinguish the following aspects of critique and exposition. 1. The object of the immanent exposition is the constitutive context of the capitalist mode of production, namely the production and exchange of commodities. Commodity production can be correlated with the genetic aspect, and commodity exchange with the integrative aspect of constitution. This description is immanent because and insofar as its conceptual grasp of the object is guided by the perspective of the prevailing self-conception of bourgeois society. Marx sees this expressed in theories of classical political economy, whose essential features he believes to be exemplarily stated already in the natural right thinking of John Locke, especially in his conception of the state of nature. Lockes influence on the Scottish moral philosophers, especially Adam Smith, and on classical political economy, is interpreted by
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Marx in such a way that Lockes philosophy . . . served as the basis for all subsequent conceptions of British economics.6 These theorists view the natural law construction of a state of nature not just as a methodical normative model for legitimizing a just social order, but realistically interpreted and harmonistically diffused (invisible hand) as the description of an economic and market-like functional context which is called bourgeois society. This natural society (Habermas), however, retains that pre-political constitution, peculiar to the Lockean state of nature, which is guaranteed in its legal and property structure by a state standing outside society. The specific constitution of the social context is conceived, as in Locke, prototypically to result from the process of self-preservation of totally independent, individual private persons. As these secure their individual self-preservation by (increasing) appropriation of private property, acquired legally either as the result of their own work or through contractually regulated exchange of goods, the general social context is constituted through the pursuit of private interests. Locke is also the originator of the thought-construct that natural objects are made into rightful private property through mixing with them ones own labor this is also one motif of the Marxian concept of objectification. Additional Lockean characteristics could be named, but I want to stress just one more: according to this conception, the appropriation of property through ones work unfolds in the private sphere and/or in the prehistory of bourgeois society, so that the exchange of commodities alone appears to be the constitutive sphere of bourgeois society. Marx thus uses a strictly immanent procedure when he begins with the commodity-world, the individual commodity, and the exchange of commodities, and describes all further constitutive relations of bourgeois society, which are at the same time always appropriation-relations, from this perspective. From this immanent perspective the capitalist mode of production is seen to lead to functional crises and with the tendential fall in the rate of profit, to a structural self-contradiction. In the end, according to Marx, immanent description shows that bourgeois society is a functionally self-contradictory (i.e. a negative) whole. 2. Immanent critique measures capitalist society by its own normative self-conception and judges the extent to which this is realized. Its specifically critical task is to distinguish between apparently and truly realized claims, whereby truly critical critique comes to clarify the genesis of these self-contradictions. This is not a matter of just any normative value conceptions but precisely of those normative claims which are functionally necessary for the constitutive togetherness of capitalist society. According to the immanent exposition these are the legal and moral principles which are followed by contractually regulated commodity-exchange, namely that relationship between freedom, equality and private property, which is prototypically formulated in Lockes construction of the state of nature, and which Marx, via Hegels theory of abstract right, adopts for his critique of capital. 7 The formal principles of the universal freedom and equality of abstract legal persons are assumed to be reciprocally fulfilled in the exchange
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relations between private owners; the realization of arbitrary private interests by means of the exchange of equivalents is considered at the same time to result in the common good. The assumption that private property can be acquired rightfully and uncoercively, apart from exchange, only through ones own work., principally goes back to Locke. In the immanent exposition of the overall context, namely the totality of the capitalist mode of production, and particularly in the section on reproduction, while developing his immanent critique, Marx also discredits these natural right principles;8 their universal claims will be unmasked as merely particularistic. The principle of equivalence is only an apparent fulfillment of the claim to justice; in fact it presupposes a class society, i.e. injustice. At this point, however, the limits of immanent critique also become evident: The full implication and scope of the judgement that the normative claim and the realization process do not match depends in turn on these immanent standards proving to be, in part, reasonable and justifiable. 3. This is where transcendent critique begins. Its normative standard goes critically beyond the claim to justice of natural right theories that link freedom, equality, and private property. Within a broader normative horizon it shows, on the one hand, the limitedness but also the particular truth of the immanent standard, while on the other hand examining the totality of capitalist society in light of it. In determining the criteria for this transcendent critique the Marxian theory is not clear. Four competing versions can be distinguished:
(a) The resourceful objectivism of the Marxian philosophy of history, whether as the history of class struggles or as the history of the development of the productive forces and relations of production, overlooks the specifically moral question of grounding critique, and implicitly assumes a concept of progress. On account of these hypostatizations the adequacy of historical materialism to serve as the general framework for the critique of capitalism has been called into question.9 (b) A productivist interpretation of the standard of transcendent critique makes work the dominant general principle, so that all concrete relations are considered only from this point of view. Under the heading of the reduction of interaction to work, this version has been critized especially by Habermas.10 (c) From the few textural passages in which Marx sketches a postcapitalist society as an association of free men, a Rousseauian interpretation of the standard of transcendent critique can be extrapolated. But this also involves a Rousseauian simplification: Individuals are already qualitatively so developed that they can be harnessed to the rational common welfare without any problems. Thus the stubborn central problem of the mediation between individuals and community is inadequately solved, and Marx resorts to various auxiliary constructions: Anthropological assumptions, idealizations of social relations or of the historical agent; moreover, an unmediated dualism between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom leads to that gap in Marxian theory which has been criticized more than once in recent years.11 (d) One version of transcendent critique, which I see as no less problematic
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but nonetheless as extremely productive in its point of departure, can be found in the structure and function of the historiographic passages of Capital In the following, therefore, I will attempt to reconstruct this historically
situated transcendent critique.
At first sight these passages appear to be historical illustrations clarifying various economic categories. In that case they would have no theoretical weight of their own. This is contradicted in the Preface to the first edition by Marxs emphatic praise of the social statistics from which the material of the historiographic passages is mainly taken. This science of social statistics has been carried out in England by expert, impartial, and unrelenting men for the investigation of truth (A X): It presents a truth which lifts its veil, so that bourgeois society will be horrified at its own condition. This unveiling function of the historiographic passages points to their critical role. In their general form these passages show the historically described effects of the development of capital on the fate of men, especially of the working class. They show the subsuming of precapitalist modes of work and life under the hegemony of capital, the workers acts of resistance, and struggles for a life in accord with their rights, but also the formation of their life-process and conditions. The immediate objects of description are, in general terms, historical life conditions. In them history is thematized in a twofold fashion: On the one hand, these present the internal history of the development or constitution of capital-formation; on the other hand they sketch a universal history, within whose horizon the historicity of the capitalist mode of production is revealed. My thesis is that the structure and function of the historical reflections12 imply a normative standard which also transcends the standard of immanent critique. To elaborate this normative content, however, a reconstruction of the critique of capital from a new vantage point is needed, and I would like to undertake it with the conceptual tools of contemporary social theory.
II. System and Lifeworld as Interpretative Categories in Capital 1. The pair of concepts, social- and system-integration have been developed in modern social theory in order to conceptualize total social contexts. They can in turn be interpreted in terms of the paradigmatic concepts system and lifeworld (Lebenswelt). Here I restrict myself to a short sketch of these concepts as needed only for interpretative purposes, and based mainly on J. Habermass approach.13 As opposed to the theory tradition of Husserl and Schutz, centered on the paradigm of consciousness, Habermas has introduced the concept of the lifeworld as complementary to that of communicative action. It designates primarily the commonly shared, horizonlike situations presupposed by the communicative acts of at least two agents.14 In the case of purely communicative action, this definition of the common situation, which Habermas differentiates into the components of culture, society, and personality, can be reconstructed ideal-typically as the result of processes of interpersonal communication. The understanding achieved thereby can be
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based on the justifiable redemption of criticizable validity-claims. In this ideal-typical case the symbolic unity of the lifeworld would be a purely communicative one achieved through arguments, i.e. rationally. Opposed to this is the insight that social action contexts are influenced by processes of social-systems which cannot be comprehended as processes of communication. A system is defined as a state in which several elements are so interrelated that they are preserved through an inner/outer differentiation compared with a complex environment (Umwelt), thus producing a characteristic achievement of order which can be reproduced in stable states.15 Social action contexts can be examined from the point of view both of the preservation of the lifeworld and of the preservation of the social system. In the everyday context of historically concrete, social action I will call the whole of intersubjectively shared action situations the historico-social lifeworld.16 They always exist in the plural, their respective unities are not pure communication units and they are as a rule represented in the form of narratives. In narratives the effects of systematic processes on lifeworlds can be expressed without their being definable solely narratively; furthermore, individual and collective life-stories and the respectively relevant cultural knowledge are also reproduced in narratives. The narratively representable unity of claims (ansprchliche Einheit) of historico-social lifeworlds is interpreted from the perspective of the participants in relation to their conceptions of the good life. Under conditions of modernity other constructions come to replace that of the good life. In their respective normative content these unities of claims are understandable only in relation to the interpretations of the respective participants. We can now distinguish the concepts of social- and system-integration in the light of the mode of coordination of actions.17 We speak of social integration when the behavioral orientations of agents coordinate their actions via a system of social norms. Thus (a) legitimate social relations between agents are made possible; (b) the systemic ordering as a whole can be legitimated; and (c) the required social roles can be learned (socialization), perceived successfully (role-specific motivation), and stabilized (assurance of social identity). This normative coordination of behavior is based on the recognized validity of norms which establish a social obligation through a claim of justice, and which is assured by sanctions. By contrast, we speak of systemic integration when, independently of the actual, normative behavioral orientations, actions are coordinated by the accumulation of their achievements (behavioral effects, consequences, products). Thus (a) interdependencies of social subsytems are assured; (b) the persistence of this system can be asserted versus an external and internal environment, and (c) partial system-specific structures, e.g. organizations, can be preserved. This coordination of behavioral achievements presupposes that the respective achievement in respectively particular ways, is indifferent to action and to the respective lifeworld situation of action.18 2. These brief explanations of the concepts of system- and socialintegration and of historico-social lifeworlds can now be specified more
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closely to apply to constitution processes characteristic of capitalism, but in such a way that they can at the same time be given a critical turn as distinguished from the constrictions of the Marxian approach. We had already shown how the integrating aspect of capital-specific constitution dominates. Commodity exchange processes appear as the sole mode of integration which can now be differentiated into processes of systemand social-integration. I will call System-integrative all those objectified (versachlichte) exchange processes. Social-integrative will be named all processes which make exchange possible through the normative integration of individuals via relations of right and will (B 99); i.e. by means of the norms of formal freedom and equality among abstract legal persons. The systematic character of capital formation is explained by Marx abstractly in the formula M-G-M, which transforms value into an automatic, internally self-processing subject (A 115) that determines its identity with itself in the form of money (B 169), thus producing its specific inner/outer delimitation (i.e. systematic achievement of order) in an accumulative systematicity (self-valorization). The systematic character of processes of accumulation and reproduction, in which capitalism creates its own preconditions, that is the capital relation between the capitalists and wageworkers, (B 591 ff) is analyzed in its totality. Marx explains the indifferent (i.e. general) character of action which makes possible the systematic integration of the consequences of action, in the light of indifferent (gleichgltig) traits of abstract labor. Abstract labor is indifferent to the natural material object of use and to the need that is satisfied thereby; it is indifferent to the particular kind of activity and to the working individual and his social situation. These traits of indifference are expressed in the characteristics of labor, generating exchange-value. Such labor is called the same, undifferentiated, unindividuated, abtract, general, human labor.19 These features are further perpetrated via the indifferent relation of private producers, culminating in the relation to themselves of those who own labor-power, and manifesting themselves in the formation of action-contexts in the lifeworld. This morphology of indifference relations, described by Marx with such extraordinary subtlety, cannot be treated in detail here. Since at the end of this critique Marx unmasks the capitalist system as a whole to be a coercive domination-context, these indifference-relations are describable as forms of concealed domination. Because of their indifference they are not to be defined as manifest, but rather as forms of structural domination. The explanation of the morphology of the indifferent features of action presupposes a certain concept of action. The one-sided and constrictive definition of action as socially productive, objective activity, given to it by Marx, has been criticized.20 Our reinterpretation allows us to point out a further consequence of this inadequate definition. All that is left of a more broadly conceived, though one-sidedly-defined concept of action (as objectrelated activity)., is the arid substratum abstract work, with its underlying, minimal quasi-natural features of purposive-rationality, that is the distinction between means and object (cf. B 193); this fact merely characterizes the totality of those indifferences, which come to constrain a highly differentiated
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concept of action. The one-sided understanding of the fundamental concept of action, which views it only as productive-objective activity, is bought at the cost of neglecting the extent of indifference, which is created in the course of its reduction to abstract labor. Marx is thus categorically too innocuous in his definition of the action-indifferences required for system-integration, and that also means, in his characterization of the domination relations of the capitalist system. Marx did, however, see one essential problem which such a conception of system-integration poses, and tried to solve it within the framework of his concepts: namely, how the indifference of consequences of action itself in general arises and can be stabilized. Consequences of action are, for Marx, products of action. According to the conception of immanent critique, the societal starting-situation of the integrating constitution is that between isolated private producers. Their societal relation to one another (which would have to be clarified via a more fundamental concept of action), is represented via the value-characteristics of their exchange products. Via the concept of value objectivity Marx tries to grasp conceptually the implicit identification of social relations with the objective qualities of things. This identification is called reification, and the hypostasized independence of things determines reification all the way to fetishism. The specifically capitalist origin of those indifference features of action are explained thereby. This reflection leads Marx from the first definition of the objective form of value to the equivalence form and then to the definition of money, because money brings this mode of indifference to full evidence (with money one has the social connexion in ones pocket), and money can be socially differentiated out and stabilized through a medium of its own. Marx shows that such system-integration remains unstable as long as appropriation based on work, i.e. the genetic dimension of constitution, also proceeds under the form of commodity exchange and for this human labor must be exchangeable as the commodity of labor-power. Thus further phenomena of indifference come into the focus of the analysis; these affect the relation to others and the self-relation of the workers. The self-relation of the owners of labor-power, characterized by indifference, and expressing the self-objectivation of personal and communal life, produces further indifference-phenomena, which through transformations in the world of work come to affect the lifeworld of individuals in general. For Marx the aboliton of this indifference [which he conceives of as the return of action achievements (products) to the doer], is not seen in light of a Hegelianizing and idealistic concept of activity, but in light of an analysis of the effects of system-integrating action consequences upon the socio-historical lifeworlds. 3. Capital-specific social integration is achieved via the normative, legal, and voluntary relations accompanying commodity exchange. Marx analyzes through them the ideas of freedom and equality of Lockes state of nature and adopts, in part word for word, their recapitulation in Hegels theory of abstract right. The introduction of this abstract right of persons occurs in two stages.
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First, the concepts, person and private owner, are specified with reference to exchange processes (cf. B 99). This then defines the social identity (role) whereby individuals are integrated into the system. Points of reference of social integration are persons, not individuals in their qualitative identity. Individuality, rather, stands in a relation of relative indifference to person, as its carrier. Only the second stage (purchase and sale of labor power, B 181 ff.) deals with the link between the relationship to other persons and the typical self-relation under capitalism. The self-relation between person and individual, between mask and character, just as interpersonal relations, becomes a pure relation of ownership and property. Ultimately it is only this self-relation which reifies individuality that also makes selfpreservation possible for the wage-laborer and that characterizes the typical relation between persons. Just as the reifying self-relation is based on indifference to oneself, so too, relations among persons are indifferent to their respective individuality. This graduated inner structure of private owners to one another and to their respective selves is based on the mediation of all their relations through property. It is this domination of mediating property that specifically restricts the integrating norms of freedom and equality. These are formal and universal in their claim but are in fact internally related to private property. They are hence abstract norms of freedom and equality, valid only because indifferent to ones own individuality and that of others. A reconstruction of the fulfillment of their validity claims would therefore have to make these limits explicit and this would be the task of transcendent critique. The integrative social relations of exchange of equivalents are thus considered legitimate, insofar as the validity claim of the norms of freedom and equality is normatively restricted. Even the social identity of the person or private owner can be successfully perceived and preserved because it appears merely as the result of the satisfaction of legitimate interests of the individual,21 The behavioral orientation to private interests, which is also a basis of motivation, is considered legitimate because the formal norms of freedom and equality presuppose and regulate arbitrary actions of private individuals. Likewise, the legitimacy of the whole system of order is also assumed since it is thought that precisely the pursuit of private interests is to produce the common good, and that in this process only the formal norms of freedom and equality are followed. Thus the assumption of a self-regulating, harmonious totality, which Marx ironically describes as standing under the auspices of the ever-so-clever providence becomes possible. 4. Marx reaches the level of the historico-social lifeworlds by specifying further the reifying self-relation of the owners of labor-power. In positive terms he places at the basis of his analysis an Aristotelian-Hegelian concept of life which he however only indirectly elucidates as when he describes the modes in which the systematic patterns of integration subsume and overdetermine life. In this, he pursues his program of immanent exposition. The wage-worker must relate to the totality of his life-possibilities by abstracting a part of them so reductively that they are defined as his labor-capacity, and this in turn is so redefined that it becomes alienable as a
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reified force.22 By owning and alienating his labor power, the laborer enters a specifically graduated, practical self-relation which is indifferent to the totality of his life-possibilities. Formally the alienation is determined by the sale of labor-power; in actuality by its real alienation in the work process. Life, as the totality of his possibilities of action, constitutes the outer framework for his self-formation as a person, i.e. as the private owner of himself. In accordance with the atomistic fiction of natural right theories, in this self-relation the relation to others appears only as the negative relation among property-owners. The unity of life shaped by system integration is thus grasped as a successful property relation. Thus life is no longer lived for its own sake but the entire life-process is used to implement a certain type of activity, namely the alienation of labor power. What was posited by capitalist integration in the purchase and sale as labor-power only as a possibility, namely the gradual reduction of all possibilities of life to a work capacity, and its abstraction of labor-power, is realized so-to-speak retroactively in the development of the capitalist production process. First, only the doubly reduced realization of labor-power in which the actualization of the natural capacity dominates that of the mental faculty, is considered (B 192 ff.; on the division between intellectual and manual work, see note 20). Then in the 4th section (cooperation, manufacturing, big industry) the reshaping of the universally human labor-power, which for Marx is a generic species capacity, into forms of realization which are adequate to this dominant type of behavior (alienation of labor-power) are analyzed. In this process communal work is replaced by capitalist cooperation; the skilled craftsmans self-confirmation in the product of his work is regulated by abnormally specified partial task, which compulsively promote skill in detail while repressing a world of productive drives and capacities (B 381); and instead of a socially controlled scientific production, a scientized big industry results whose aim is to control and discipline the wage workers. In sum, we can call these processes of the formation of the work-capacity, the formation of the work-world. The world of work can be understood as a sector of the historico-social lifeworld. The formation of human work capacity or of the world of work, however, encroaches upon the unity of life possibilities or of the historico-social lifeworlds. The practical self-relation of the owner of labor-power constitutes the immanent entry into the sphere of the historico-social lifeworlds. Their system-integrative formation, parallel to and by means of the formation of the world of work, is analyzed by Marx according to the requirements of an immanent description. Marx formulates it sublimely: Labor power exists only as the natural capacity of the living individual. Its production thus presupposes his existence. Given the existence of the individual, the production of labor-power consists in his own reproduction or preservation. For his preservation the living individual needs a certain means of life. (B 185) From here on means of life is the heading under which the historico-social lifeworld becomes directly thematized in the course of the immanent exposition. Its peculiarities are of interest only insofar as they enter into the value-determination of necessary means of life. Over and beyond
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the provision of means of life, however, the capitalist system also transforms the content of the historico-social lifeworld subsumed under it.23 Within the framework of his immanent description Marx is satisfied with a coarse sketch of everything that is meant by means of life from the system perspective. This includes the collective cultural and historical self-interpretation of modes of life, which have been formed under the conditions of the habits and life-claims of the class of free laborers (B 185). Marx, as is well known, sums up as follows: The value-determination of work (contains) an historical and moral element. (Ibid.) In the same mode of immanent description Marx concretizes these elements by alluding to family, socialization and education (cf. B 175f). These cultural phenomena of collective self-interpretaion, customs, socialization, education, traditional forms of life, and the like, which are after all only realizable via normative-symbolic action-contexts, can be named the claim to unity of the historico-social lifeworld. The norms coordinating this unity, however, are not primarily socio-integrative ones. The domination of freedom, equality, private property and Bentham (B 139), which assures social integration, is continued in the formation of the historico-social lifeworld in such a way that only the implementation of these norms can guarantee a secondary assurance of the processes of social integration. At this point the lack of an adequate conceptual definition of the structure of the various historico-social lifeworlds becomes critical for Marx. For from the point of view of the subsumed elements he can have only an inadequate conceptual grasp of those processes of subsumption for which he, from the perspective of the system, has developed the concepts of formal and real subsumption24 of the world of labor and the historico-social lifeworld. Marxs proof of the absolute limits to the formation of the world of work (length of the work day, cf. B 323) and of particular restrictions like the particular modes of production, which give rise to system-dysfunctional developments in cooperation, manufacturing and big industry, remains ambivalent, locked in on the one hand and on the other type summaries (e.g. B 430). If the formation of the world of labor is conceptually analyzed nonetheless, this occurs precisely because an Aristotelean-Hegelian notion of work and life are presupposed as a normative yardstick. The formation of historico-social lifeworlds, however, remains conceptually underdefined, since Marx is excessively oriented to the conceptual tools of immanent description. Therefore, in the course of immanent description he slides conceptually into the fiction which the capitalist system also assumes, namely that the historico-social lifeworld offers no conceptually identifiable, and hence principled resistance to its own subsumption under capital. Only a change of perspective in exposition and critique enable Marx, at least in his historical observations, to describe the peculiarities of those spheres and their resistance potential. Therefore, transcendent critique uses a mode of description of its own, which is no longer restricted to a theoretico-conceptual comprehension of its object, but which uses the argumentative-narrative presentation of the historical material as obtained through observation. The explication of the content of these historical
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observations, as descriptions of historico-social lifeworlds, necessarily, therefore, goes beyond Marxs conceptual framework. III. Immanent and Transcendent Critique Reinterpreted 1. First the systematic construction of Capital can be reformulated. The immanent exposition at the beginning develops the abstract forms of capitalist system- and social-integration (Section 1 of Capital, B 49-191); in section 2 (B 161-191) their specific relationship is formally shown, and the realization of the systematic modes of integration through an analysis of the processes of formal (production of absolute surplus value) and real subsumption (production of relative surplus value) is demonstrated; through the transformation of the world of labor, moreover, the historico-social lifeworlds are also subsumed (Sections 3 and 4, B 192-530). Sections 5 and 6 (B 581-588) then describe the developed system- and social-integration, while section 7 deals with the totality of the system, and the end of the immanent critique also signals the end of the criticized object. The structure of immanent critique has already been explained in part I above. The critique transcending it focuses on the historico-social lifeworld structures, which are reshaped and assimilated in the constitution of capital via system- and social-integrative processes. This critique contrasts the development of system-constitutive processes with the history of their consequences for the historico-social lifeworld. The relationship between the two critical programs and the standard of transcendent critique therefore first come fully into view only when we elaborate these historical moments and the historico-philosophical intentions of Marxian critique. Until now we have treated these intentions cursorily, because of their paradoxically underemphasized character in Capital. Since in the systematic construction of his critique, Marx undertakes a mimetic recapitulation of capitalism in order to achieve a unity of critique and exposition, he must also bear the cost: the capitalist system portrays itself as an eternal, unhistorical formation of society, with contingent beginnings and unsurpassable rationality, to which there is no future historical alternative. Thus there once was a history, but there no longer is. (B 96) This conclusion, which Marx at the very beginning of his critique, flings at the faces of bourgeois economists as an unmasking dictum, forces itself upon him at the end of the critique: the astonishingly thin chapter on the Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation, where it would all have to unfold, itself operates with the make-shift category of the negation of negation; in the second edition the category of the free laborer as a creation of the creation of the capitalist era is eliminated (cf. A 745 and B 791), and the 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party is cited. Again Marx is competing with the systematic intentions of his own critique, by presenting political and evolutionary considerations which approach the problem from the outside. By constrast, reflection on the immanent style of Marxs critique as a whole, permits an elaboration of history which takes these unfulfilled intentions into account. The dominance of system-integrative over social-integrative processes and the concomitant distortions and restrictions of the world of
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work and of the historico-social lifeworld which accompany it, consist essentially of an abstraction from, and disregard for, their historical moments. In order to bring these into view, we must make more precise our sketch of the systematic structure of Capital presented above. We began implicitly with the thesis that immanent exposition structures Capital as a whole. Yet the end of immanent exposition does not coincide with the end of the book; about one fourth of the book is yet to come (Chapters 23 to 25). This particular circumstance must be explained. At the end of immanent exposition the object is considered in its totality, as the reproduction process of capital. Marx explains this to be the reproduction of the capital-specific precondition, namely the separation of capitalists from wage-laborers, (cf. B 604) Capital has become its own precondition, and no longer bothers with historical preconditions that are alien to it. History is swallowed up. At the same time, however, immanent critique shows that legitimation via the exchange of equivalents is inadequate to the whole context, and that it collapses. According to the Lockean principle of natural right the only possibility for the non-coercive appropriation of goods and wealth besides exchange is ones own work. Thus, after legitimation according to the exchange model fails, there still remains the apologetics of depicting capital to be the result of the work of the capitalists. But insofar as what is meant by this are the productivity of capital and of the capitalists during the reproduction process, these have been already exposed by immanent critique as phenomena of capital fetishism, (cf. B 538 and 633f.) The critique of the exchange of equivalents shows this to be a mere appearance. Thus only the capitalists own original work is left to serve as a justification of his property. By its own systematic legitimation, capital is forced to go beyond its own highly private circularity: It must describe its historical origin. At the point where all history is apparently extinguished in the capitalist system it emerges again with reference to the whole system. Immanent critique, as it were, has its object just where it wants it. It must depict itself as an object that has originated historically, after its normative self-contradictoriness has previously indicated it to be a self-abolishing object. Marx has precisely this state of things in mind when he stresses that our method shows the point where historical observation must enter in. (Ibid.) This suggests that now the concept of immanent critique is being abandoned.25 2. The transition to historical observation is, of course, oriented by questions which immanent critique has elaborated; to this extent the latter retains its priority for the structure of the book. But what follows is no longer an immanent exposition of the object. The intentional correlate of the critique is no longer the constitution of capital, but history and historical development insofar as they stand under the influence of capital. This is where transcendent critique begins by taking up its leading questions from immanent critique. Two aspects of these historical observations can be distinguished. (a) The chapter on the original accumulation unmasks the last refuge of the immanent legitimation of capital: Not the peaceful work of an industrious and thrifty elite, (B 741) but the violent process of excluding the producers
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from the means of production is the historical truth about the origin of capital. This is the violent abolition of private property based on ones own labor (B 789): the direct contradiction of the legitimizing self-depiction of natural right theories. But this is no longer an immanent self-contradiction, but expressed emphatically and a bit loosely here prior history contradicts capital. Therefore capital must be regarded under the perspective of its historicity, i.e. it must be thematized against the horizon of its historical genesis, mutability, and abolition. Transcendent critique develops no systematic conceptual framework for this and gives no explicit standard. It would have to be called historical materialism, though without thereby establishing its theoretical status. We have already pointed out Marxs inadequate means in defining this. These deficiences consist, in my opinion, in the fact that they project reason into history, but against the background of an objectivistic theory of evolution. Their main defect is not caused by the fact that they seek to understand processes of development, but by the fact that they underdefine the relation to historical agents by hypostasizing them as subjective carriers of development, whose subjectivity is then only interpreted within the framework of stategic or purposive-rational behavior, (cf. B 791) while treating them moreover as a collective singular.26 (b) The second aspect of these historical observations, which should make it possible to correct the above-described objectivism of the Marxian conception of history internally, concerns the pursuit of transcendent critique throughout Capital, As an aspect of immanent exposition this occurs through the contrasting historiographic passages which finally lead to a separate chapter namely Chapter 23. We have interpreted these passages as descriptions of the formation processes of historico-social lifeworlds through the constitution of capital. Chapter 23 treats expressly their influence ... on the fate of the working-class. (B 640) What is subsumed here and in the contrasting passages of Capital are historically pre-existing forms of life. These, as we have shown, cannot be separated from the life-claims of the class of free workers, which are an historical product, and which depend on the cultural stage of a country (B 185). We summed up these historical and moral elements as the unitary claims of historico-social lifeworlds, but have not explained it further conceptually. A theoretical extrapolation of the normative standard used by transcendent critique must refer back to this historico-moral self-interpretation of the participants of the historico-social lifeworlds. VI. Perspectives 1. The two aspects of the historical observations of transcendent critique, whose systematic relation to immanent critique still needs elaboration, can be characterized in light of their content: they call capitalist development to account for its history (see above). The prior history of the victor, capital, is unmasked as the history of unrelenting vandalism ... carried out under the drive of the most infamous, filthiest, most pettily hateful passions. (B
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790) The internal development and eventual establishment of the history of the victor is reproached for being the history of barbarity and the history of the repressed and exploited.27 The stabilizing mechanism of capital, circular integration, has as consequence that its prior, historical, and violent barbarism is now repeated as a factor and consequence of the internal cycle (see B 604). But this in no longer depictable via the immanent concept of the systematics of capital. This latter is based, in its indifferent system-integration, on the exploitation of the alien labor of others which is, however, formally equivalent. (B 790) Since the categories of capital are formal concepts, they can thematize the content only from their perspective, namely that of subsumption by the victor. Hence, in order to bring this content under discussion, a different perspective must be chosen, that of the defeated. Therefore, the mode of the historical descriptions is, as we have shown, a particular one: It is not simply the narration of the effects of historical development spanned within the immanent, categorical framework, but it is an argumentative-narrative history-writing from changing perspectives. It does not simply describe the effect of events, but it tells the history of the normative claims of the participants of historico-social lifeworlds with respect to specific events. By retrospectively describing the struggle of conflicting claims from the perspective of the self-interpretation of the participants, both of the capitalists and the workers communicated partly through contemporary documents this method develops reasons for a condemnation of capitalism, which are discoverable only factually and historically. The normative standard of transcendent critique is implicit here. In sketching the historico-social concept of lifeworlds we had already pointed out a peculiarity of its narrative form. Narratives suggest, so to speak, the fiction that everything which is mediated through social action contexts is narratable. Accordingly, everything would be in principle comprehensible. Under this fiction the boundaries between historico-social lifeworlds and societal ordering systems would vanish: society becomes identical with the lifeworld.28 We have tried to show, however, that systemic integration consists precisely in a coordination of action effects that is indifferent from the claims of the lifeworld. These system-integrative processes originate from historicosocial lifeworlds, and act back upon them, but their logic is not that of narratives nor communication processes. The situation in which they and their back effects originate are of course narratable, but they constitute figuratively speaking alien components in narratives. In their unnarratability they cannot be made knowable through narratives. At the latest since the development of self-regulated market-contexts in societies, the prototypes of such action-systems have infected historico-social lifeworlds.29 Hence the judgments and arguments presented in narratives, or the determination of a successful unity of the lifeworld are not justified merely because they are narratable. Narratives, and the units of historico-social lifeworlds presented in them comprise, so to speak, merely the medium in which the claims of system-rationality and communicatively oriented action-rationality meet each other. In order, therefore, to distill out of the argumentative-narrative presentation
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of the historiographic passages a normative standard for the adequacy or inadequacy, for the rightness or unjustifiability, of the systemic formation processes of historico-social lifeworlds, a theoretically explicit consideration of their normative content that goes beyond the narrative structures must be undertaken. This can, in my opinion, be done by means of three kinds of theories: In the theory of a formal pragmatics the structures of communicatively oriented social action can be analyzed; in the theory of ego-identity formation, the structures of successful qualitative identities; and in the theory of communicative ethics, the structures of rational, moral justification processes.30 Because these are very complicated and still developing fields of research, I consciously want to avoid the appearance of taking any definitive stands here. But the previous considerations do place demands on a theoretical explication of normative content. I would like to suggest this in a further reflection on the historicity of the normative standard of transcendent critique. 2. If the normative content of historico-social lifeworlds is explained only via a reconstruction of competencies, its historicity, so to speak, vanishes. Habermas, who from a reconstructive perspective, projects the content of historico-social lifeworlds onto the various theoretical strands of the theory of evolution, universal pragmatics, and ego-identity development, thus tears apart precisely the context which determines a historico-social lifeworld as historical. It is, however, the case that, contrary to the opinion of many of his critics, he sees and addresses this problem very well himself. By means of a new version of the relation between reconstruction and self-reflection he tries to bring history into play again as a process of enlightenment of all participants.31 Whether that will succeed, can be judged only by the eventual practicality of the normative content or by a successful social life-context. Habermas thereby appeals, however, to a mode of rational moral grounding which is based on a practical discourse between concerned persons.32 Precisely this, however, is the immediate form of the standard of transcendent critique, as well as of its theoretically explicable content. This can be checked specifically against the natural right norms of freedom and equality, which transcendent critique examines. Its first critical step consists in proving that the bourgeois norms of freedom and equality are not formal enough, because they are restricted by the content of private property. But transcendent critique would have to raise objections even to the formally clean version of universal principles of freedom and equality. For qua formally universal principles these cannot be universal in the sense that they also indicate factually historical situations in which the self-interpretations of the participants of historico-social lifeworlds first produce generalizable normative claims.33 Examples of such processes can be found in the extension of the ideas of freedom and equality by the working class in the 19th century to new domains of application or in the demands of the womens movement and the ecological movement.34 These are phenomena of a similar kind to the ones reflected in the historical observations of transcendent critique. But this historicity of the normative standard of transcendent critique should not be introduced into the
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theoretical reconstruction, just at the end of a communicative ethic, and with a view to its practical realization. Historical conditionedness and rational modes of justification are two equally important moments of a communicative ethic, which would have to be grasped as the normative standard of transcendent critique. This would be a systematic reason for arriving at the normative content of transcendent critique through an historical analysis of the normative ideas of social movements, among them also some which Marx neglected to consider. The theory of communicative ethics and the historically applied analysis of real movements belong together on an equal footing. For research purposes, their connection could be conceived as follows: The historical analyses extract the content of the normative ideas of social movements, which can be checked retrospectively with regard to their justifiability by means of a theory of communicative ethics. This itself, however, remains dependent on the content of the moral ideas of historical movements for the grounding of its rational justification procedures. This connection of historicity and normative reason can be examined further in light of another peculiarity of the Habermasian theory of communicative ethics. As H. Peukert has shown, its normative ideal aims at an unlimited communication community, which would have to extend in anamnetic solidarity even to past generations.35 The paradox of this anamnetic solidarity, however, in my opinion calls for a combination of consciousness-raising and redemptive critique.36 The quarrel between Horkheimer and Benjamin over the finishedness or unfinishedness of the past37 was already predecided by Marx in his Critique of the Political Economy in favor of Benjamin. The standard of transcendent critique requires a solidarity with the oppressed of the past. It is a redemptive critique not only in the sense of a semantic preservation of tradition, but also in the sense of the redemption of the living claims which an historico-social lifeworld, not subsumed under capital, could have realized. 38 And it is a critique that situates itself within the framework of a consciousness-raising critique. It understands present society, critically by forming a concept of it and stating the truth about it. Its standard is one that exists and develops historically, and that deals with the context even of the contingent self-interpretations of acting human beings and that at the same time does not renounce the quest for reason in history. 3. In conclusion, let me discuss the farewell from critique as a theoretical activity as Marx tries to explain this in Capital under the topic of the Abolition of Critique by a Practical Turn. Marx gives a paradigmatic version of this in a passage of Capital where the whole of capital-formation is not yet thematic. He changes from the retrospective stance of a describer and narrator into the present voice of dramaturgy,39 in which the voice of the worker, which had fallen silent in the storm and stress of the production process, suddenly is raised. (B 247 f.) The worker makes his claims and argues for them on the basis of prior development. He is thus still ignorant of the exchange of equivalents, so that his argumentation still shares its limitations and one-sidedness: But it is a
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practical turn of critique that leads thus to a struggle for the limitation of the workday. (B 249 f) Marx probably thought that such a practical application of consciousness-raising theoretical critique should take place on the basis of knowledge of the whole. That is the goal of the practico-political orientation of his critique which begins immanently and leads to transcendent critique. Such a critique of present society is still lacking. If we project the characteristic moments of a Marxian version of critique onto the tracks of universal theories of ethics., social action, and social evolution, we lose their specifically historical tone and historical dependence. Whether they can be regained at the end of the theoretical project in the course of a self-enlightenment leading to self-reflection, or can be introduced into communicative ethics on an equal footing is a matter of discussion and needs to be treated more at length than is possible here. In any case, a theory of historical materialism which takes the Marxist intentions seriously, as they are stated in his Critique of the Political Economy, cannot be established as a framework theory. It would rather have to accept itself as falling within the horizon of critique under the heading of the abolition of critique. Hence even Marxs political theses on the expropriation of a few expropriators by the popular masses (B 791) could appear in a different light, namely as interference in the sense of the practical application of critique. But that would probably be too benevolent, since the certainty of this insight is due to the wheel (Rad) of history, not to its advice (Rat).
NOTES 1 J. Habermas, Zur Rekonstruktion des historischen Materialismus (Frankfurt, 1976), p. 144; English trans. by T. McCarthy, Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism, Communication and Evolution of Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979); see also p. 41, where Das Kapital is called a component (Teilstck) of historical materialism. 2 Habermas, Historical Materialism and the Development of Normative Structures, in: Communication and the Evolution of Society, p. 97. 3 Ibid., p. 127. 4 K. Korsch distinguished three forms of revolutionary critique in Das Kapital: a) as immanent critique, Das Kapital is a rather consistent treatment of economic categories, their generalization up to the limits of the economic; b) as transcendent critique, Das Kapital exceeds the framework of economic theory itself, and proceeds to a historical and sociological description of the development of the bourgeois mode of production all the way to the struggle of social classes; c) as transcendental critique, which is the normal and typical one in Das Kapital, the form of economic knowledge ... is restricted totally to its particular historical and social limits, K. Korsch, Karl Marx (Frankfurt, 1967), p. 220f. Our distinction differs from Korschs very stimulating ideas since it is explicated in a different (non-Kantian) frame of reference and seeks especially to clarify the relation between these types of critique, which is left completely in the dark by Korsch. 5 Cf. Marx/Engels, Briefe ber Das Kapital (Berlin, 1954), p. 80 ff. The concept of critical exposition (kritische Darstellung) was clarified especially by M. Theunissen, Sein und Schein (Frankfurt, 1978), esp. pp. 13-91. 6 K. Marx, Theorien ber den Mehrwert, I, MEW, p. 331. 7 A. Wellmer has elaborated such a point of departure of Marxian critique; his ideas coincide on important points with those presented here, see A. Wellmer Praktische Philosophie
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8 9
10 11
12 13
14 15 16
und Theorie der Gesellschaft, in Normen und Geschichte, ed. by W. Oelmller (Paderborn: UTB, 1979), p. 154 ff. Cf. also Seyla Benhabib, The Marxian Method of Critique: Normative Presuppositions, Praxis International, vol. 4. No. 3 (October 1984), pp. 284-299. I am quoting abridgedly: A refers to, K. Marx, Das Kapital I, 1st ed. (Hamburg, 1867); unchanged photomechanical reprint (Tokyo, 1959); B, to K. Marx, Das Kapital I, 2nd and following editions, MEW (Berlin, 1968); here see B 609 ff. Thus already K. Korsch, in Marxismus und Philosophie (Frankfurt, 1969); A. Schmidt, Geschichte und Struktur (Munich, 1971); J. Habermas, Zur Rekonstruktion des historischen Materialismus; for an engaged leftist-Marxist attempt at transformation, cf. Andreas Wildt, Produktivkrfte and soziale Umwlzung, in U. Jaeggi and A. Honneth, eds., Theorien des historischen Materialismus (Frankfurt, 1977), p. 106 ff. J. Habermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse (Frankfurt, 1968), p. 36 ff. J. Habermas, Theorie und Praxis (Frankfurt, 1978), p. 117; A. Wellmer, Kritische Gesellschaftstheorie und Positivismus (Frankfurt, 1969); D. Bhler, Metakritik der Marxschen Ideologiekritik (Frankfurt, 1971); T. Meyer, Der Zwiespalt in der Marxschen Emanzipationstheorie (Kronberg/Ts., 1973). K. Marx. Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen konomie (East Berlin, 1953) p. 36 f; quoted in text as Gr. plus page number. J. Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Frankfurt, 1981) 2 vols; Engl. transl. by T. A. McCarthy, Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. I (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983). Abbreviated in the following as TkH. On a few points I deviate from Habermas definitions of these terms. Cf. Habermas TkH, II, p. 182 ff. Cf. Ibid., p. 338 ff. Habermas speaks of the socio-cultural lifeworld, Ibid., p. 207 ff. There is also an objective link between historico-social lifeworlds and what Habermas calls forms of life. (cf. p. 165 ff.)
17 The following are very concise working definitions of terms which were first formulated by D. Lockwood, Social Integration and System Integration, in Zollschan and Hirsch, eds., Explorations in Social Change (London, 1964). Cf. also Habermas, TkH, II, p. 179 ff. and 275 ff. 18 This systemic coordination of behavior can be intensified or stabilized via media like money or power. Cf. on this point, Habermas, TkH, II, p. 167 ff. and 384 ff. 19 Cf. the original and most differentiated definitions of the traits of value-forming work in K. Marx, Zur Kritik der politischen konomie (Berlin, 1970), pp. 23 ff. 20 Most recently, E.M. Lange, Das Prinzip Arbeit (Frankfurt, 1973); cf. also C.B. Macpherson, Die politische Theorie des Besitz-Individualismus: (Frankfurt, 1967), esp. p. 295 ff; Engl. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964). 21 Cf. H. Neuendorf, Der Begriff des Interesses (Frankfurt, 1973). 22 For the Aristotelian Marx, labor capacity is a composite capacity: the mental faculty acquired through learning and education dominates the realization of the quasi-given natural capacity. In the formative definition of labor-power typical of capitalism, the dependency is reversed: as the realization of labor-power, the mental faculty (reduced to attention) follows the natural process of the realization of the natural capacity. On Marxs adoption of Aristotelian terms, cf. Ursula Wolf, Mglichkeit und Notwendgkeit bei Aristoteles und heute (Munich, 1979). 23 Cf. the seminal study by Wolfgang Pohrt, Theorie des Gebrauchswerts (Frankfurt, 1976); cf. also the attack on consumer society, in: P.P. Pasolini, Freibeuterschriften (Berlin, 1978); cf. also H. Marcuse, Kontrarevolution und Revolte (Frankfurt, 1973).
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24 Cf. B 533 f. and K. Marx Resultate des unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesses (Frankfurt, 1969), p. 45 ff. 25 This is what does not allow history, historical evolution, and universal history to become thematic as an independent framework theory of capitalist development, but only by means of the critique of the constitution of capital. In the framework of his studies on the dialectical contradiction, M. Theunissen comes to a similar thesis; cf. Krise der Macht, in Hegel-Jahrbuch 1974 (Cologne, 1975), p. 325. 26 Cf. J. Habermas, ber das Subjekt der Geschichte, recently in: Kultur und Kritik (Frankfurt, 1973), p. 389 ff. 27 Cf. Walter Benjamin, ber den Begriff der Geschichte, in Gesammelte Werke, Vols. I and II (Frankfurt, 1974), esp. p. 696 f. 28 Cf. A. Wellmer, Kommunikation und Emanzipation, in Jaeggi and Honneth, eds., Theorien des historischen Materialismus (Frankfurt, 1977). 29 Cf. also M. Theunissen, Sein und Schein, p. 84 f. 30 Cf. programmatically, J. Habermas, Introduction, Historischer Materialismus und die Entwicklung normativer Strukturen, in Zur Rekonstruktion, p. 9 ff. 31 Cf. J. Habermas, Introduction to the new edition of Theorie und Praxis; cf. also M. Theunissen, Gesellschaft und Geschichte (Berlin, 1969), p. 35 f. and Habermas reply in the afterword to Erkenntnis und Interesse (Frankfurt, 1973) p. 415 ff; also Zur Rekonstruktion, p. 244 ff. 32 Cf. J. Habermas, Moralentwicklung und Ich-Identitt, in: Zur Rekonstruktion, esp. p. 81 ff.; Eng. trans. as Moral Development and Ego-Identity in: Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. by T. A. McCarthy. In the project proposal, Die Entwicklung von Gerechtigkeitsvorstellungen und Begrndungsverfahren im modernen Recht als soziologisches Problem (Ms. Starnberg, 1978), K. Eder, G. Frankenberg, U. Rdel and E. Tugendhat develop the concept of a real discourse among participants, which as a corrective to a flexible principle of justice, constitutes the last stage in the sequence of moral grounding procedures. The following reflections on the normative criterion for transcendental critique would need to be specified in light of the theses of this project. 33 Cf. A. Wellmer, Praktische Philosophie. Wellmer treats in more detail this argument for transcendent critique that starts with Marxs critique of natural right theories. 34 They generally occur in the form of new ideas about the content of justice and the good life(or its modern surrogates). To what extent such ideas can be reflected in the moral grounding processes is a separate problem connected with the historicity of a communicative ethics. 35 H. Peukert, Wissenschaftstheorie, Handlungstheorie, Fundamentaltheologie (Frankfurt, 1978) esp. p. 300 ff.; Eng. trans. by James Bohmann, Science, Action and Fundamental Theology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984). 36 On these concepts, see J. Habermas, Bewutmachende oder rettende Kritik die Aktualitt Walter Benjamins in S. Unseld, ed., Zur Aktualitt Walter Benjamins (Frankfurt, 1972), p. 173 ff.; Eng. trans. by F. Lawrence, On the Actuality of Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Critique, in: Habermas, PhilosophicalPolitical Profiles (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983). 37 Peukert, Op. cit., p. 305 f. 38 In this regard, these ideas on the concept of critique in Marx coincide with Pasolinis vehement protest against the coercive abolition of traditional Italian forms of life. See note 23 above. 39 As the note in B 249 seeks to show, this is not a fictive dramaturgy. It is, incidentally, in Marxs view, the dramaturgy of all union struggles, because it presupposes the recognition of the exchange of equivalents in its legitimating-ideological function; cf. K. Marx, Resultate, p. 119 f.

3.7 - Lohmann, Georg - Marx' Capital and The Question of Normative Standards (EN)

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