Rethinking the Normative Content of Critical Theory

Rethinking the Normative Content of Critical Theory

Rethinking the Normative Content of Critical Theory Marx, Habermas and Beyond Bob Cannon Senior Lecturer in Sociology University of East London

Bob Cannon 2001 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2001 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 978-1-349-42348-4 DOI 10.1057/9781403919830 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cannon, Bob, 1952 Rethinking the normative content of critical theory : Marx, Habermas, and beyond / Bob Cannon. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Marx, Karl, 1818 1883. 2. Marxian economics. 3. Habermas, Jürgen. 4. Honneth, Axel, 1949 5. Critical theory. 6. Intersubjectivity. I. Title. HX39.5.C265 2000 335.4 dc21 00 049154 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 ISBN 978-1-4039-1983-0 (ebook)

In memory of my father, Frederick George Cannon 1920 1998

Contents Preface xi Introduction 1 Part I 1 From Self-Constitution to Self-Objectification 11 The Kantian subject 12 Overcoming Kantian antinomies 14 Hegel s moral philosophy 16 Marx and self-objectifying labour 18 Marx s critique of Hegel s idealism 22 Epistemology and social critique 24 2 Marx s Critique of Political Economy versus his Critique of Capitalism 27 Production in general 30 The dual structure of the commodity 32 Self-objectifying labour and self-valorizing value 35 The fetish character of commodities and their secret 37 Does abstract labour work? 41 Objectification and fetishization 44 3 The Capitalization of Sociality and the Sociality of Exchange 49 (i) The sociality of labour 49 (ii) The sociality of use-values 55 (iii) George Simmel and the sociality of exchange 58 4 Marx, Morality and Exploitation 67 Natural versus social property rights 67 Exploitation and exchange 72 Capitalism and justice 74 Self-objectification and consent 77 vii

viii Contents Part II Restoring the ethical content of self-constitution 80 Towards a normative account of exploitation 83 5 Communicative Action 91 From Marx to Lukács 91 From Lukács to Habermas 95 The uncoupling of system and lifeworld 98 The emergence of communicative reason 100 Discourse ethics and modernity 103 The universal status of discourse ethics 109 Reification and judgement 113 6 Labour and Morality 117 A redemptive critique of Marx? 117 Towards a comprehensive account of communicative reason 120 System and lifeworld interdependencies 124 The limits of discourse ethics 127 The promise of discourse ethics 131 7 Struggles for Moral Redemption 135 The moral content of labour 136 Struggles for recognition 139 Three steps to heaven? 142 Money, markets and morality 147 Beyond Hegel? 151 Pathology and social critique 153 8 Struggles for Social Welfare 157 Rethinking the normative ground of critical theory 159 Rethinking intersubjectivity 162 Labour movement struggles 164 Welfare economics and the re-normatization of value 168 Rethinking the welfare state 173 The New Right and the de-normatization of value 177

Contents ix Concluding Remarks 181 Notes 187 Bibliography 197 Index 207

Preface On the one hand, critical theory refers to a particular tradition that runs from the German idealist tradition of Kant, Fichte and Hegel through Marx and Lukács to the Frankfurt School of Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas and Honneth. On the other hand, critical theory refers to the tendency of modernity to subject its own grounding assumptions to an ongoing evaluation. (To this extent, postmodernism comprises a branch of critical theory in so far as it problematizes modernity s founding presuppositions.) Nevertheless, these two forms of critical theory are dirempted from one another. Thus while the former retains an allegiance to transcendental formulations, the latter articulates the empirical standpoint of participants. One of the main aims of this book is to develop further their reconciliation through an historically grounded version of critical theory. In Marx this diremption manifests itself in the tendency to ground the critique of capitalism, not in the historically emergent struggles of the labour movement, but in the essential properties of value-producing labour. To this end, Marx sets out to discover the transhistorical conditions for the possibility of production in general. The latter provides the ground for his critique of the corrupted form social production takes under capitalism. Although Marx attempts to historicize value-producing labour, he cannot do so without dissolving labour into capital. As the historical form taken by labour under capitalism, capital sets labour to work as one of its own components. Consequently, value is the product of capital self-valorizing value. In order to circumvent this outcome, Marx falls back upon a transhistorical conception of labour grounded in production in general. This, however, renders Marx s critique of capitalism vulnerable to his own critique of political economy in so far as his transhistorical conception of labour mimics the historical form taken by economic relations under capitalism. To this extent, Marx s drive to locate the source of capital in labour results in a transhistorical conception of labour that mirrors the subject object diremption of capitalist sociality. xi

xii Preface At the heart of Marx s critical strategy lies the proposition that purposive labour comprises the source, substance and subject of (capitalist) sociality. To this extent, the self-constituting properties of the latter are merely alienated expression of the self-constituting powers of the former. However, in making this claim Marx robs workers of their capacity to criticize capitalism in a normative fashion. Marx does this by substituting his own notion of undamaged subjectivity (self-objectifying labour) for the normative principles that workers bring to bear upon capitalism. Thus rather than grounding his critique of capitalism in the moral principles of participants, Marx regards labour as the secret source of value. Thus, despite placing the modern ethos of self-constitution at the centre of his analysis, Marx attaches this ethos to labour and not the labour movement. Self-constitution is regarded as a transcendental property of labour per se rather than an empirical consequence of participants attempts to make the system accountable to them. Thus in order to do justice to the struggles of participants to expand the terrain of self-constitution in opposition to the system s autopoietic imperatives, an alternative social ontology is called for, one whose normative content is synonymous with the historical context from which it emerges. Herein lies the importance of Habermas s intersubjective reworking of Marx s subject-centred account of self-constitution. Habermas s work comprises an attempt to renew critical theory by reconnecting the conditions for its possibility with the normative principles that emerge from modernity. Thus, in order to escape his Frankfurt School predecessors onedimensional portrait of modernity (Marcuse 1972), Habermas develops a more nuanced account of modernity s normative content. To this end, he reworks Kant s subject-centred notion of self-constitution in terms of the argumentative redemption of validity claims. As the repository of self-constitution, communicative action is designed to ensure that a legitimate social order corresponds to the intersubjectively agreed goals of participants. This has the advantage not only of placing self-constitution on a normative foundation, but also of placing critical theory on an historical one. Unfortunately, Habermas is also reliant on a transcendental notion of damaged intersubjectivity to the detriment of an empirically grounded notion of violated social norms. As a consequence, Habermas fails to bridge the gulf between an other-worldly and a

Preface xiii this-worldly version of critical theory. Thus, rather than grounding critical theory in the normative content of modernity, Habermas retains a transcendental notion of ethics inherent within communicative action. In this respect, modernity merely realizes the transhistorical form of ethical life inherent within language oriented to mutual understanding. To this extent, Habermas shares Marx s attempt to ground critical theory in a philosophical anthropology that imputes aims and interests to humanity in abstraction from historically located aims and interests of participants. This, however, not only serves to absolutize Western sociality (as history s first form of post-conventional sociality), but also Habermas s account of communicative action as the essence of ethical life. In order to bring Habermas s essentialist account of communicative action into proximity with its immanent institutional context, Axel Honneth emphasizes the role of social struggle in expanding the normative content of modernity. To this extent, Honneth argues that workers are motivated by moral concerns to struggle against their reduction to the status of objects. In this way, Honneth breaks from the linguistic confines of Habermas s communicative paradigm in order to locate workers struggles within the normative horizon of modernity. Nevertheless, Honneth shares with Habermas a tendency to equate the normative content of modernity with an underlying philosophical anthropology definitive of ethical life per se. To this end, Honneth seeks to uncover a form of undamaged intersubjectivity from which to identify and condemn the pathologies of modernity. Thus, rather than grounding critical theory in the moral maps of participants, Honneth views the latter as mere guides to a deeper sense of ethical life inscribed within the moral grammar of intersubjectivity. Honneth then criticizes modernity on the basis of a social ontology that not only precedes modernity, but also triumphs over the intersubjectively formulated ends of its participants. Consequently, Honneth, like Marx and Habermas before him, grounds critical theory in a set of moral principles that are at odds with the modern ethos of self-constitution. The tendency of critical theory to reduce the normative content of modernity to a set of transcendental characteristics inherent within humanity from the outset needs both explaining and cor-

xiv Preface recting. By way of explanation I venture that the tendency of critical theory to adopt the standpoint of an objective observer arises from the capacity of the economic system to reify the intersubjective lifeworld. It is therefore no coincidence that Marx, Habermas and Honneth all treat the objectivity of the economic system as a natural by-product of the material labour process. Thus, rather than criticizing the objectification (qua reification) of sociality, they adopt its standpoint in order to overrule the ethical insights of participants. It follows that it is only in so far as critical theory grounds its ethical insights in the standpoint of participants that it can challenge the system s reification of intersubjectivity and vice versa. This means grounding the norm of undamaged intersubjectivity in the standpoint of those damaged by modernity s failure to redeem its own normative content. Nevertheless, without the endeavour of Habermas, Honneth and others to reformulate critical theory along intersubjective lines, my attempt to rethink the normative content of critical theory could not have been written. For so long the poor cousin of philosophy in comparison with the mighty endeavours of epistemology ethics is only now beginning to assume its rightful place at the heart of social science. By the same token, I owe an enormous intellectual debt to the writings of Seyla Benhabib, Jay Bernstein, Nancy Fraser, Thomas McCarthy and Iris Marion Young for their attempts to generate a substantive account of ethical life, grounded in the struggles of social movements to redeem the normative content of modernity. Thanks of a more personal nature are due to my PhD supervisor Peter Osborne, whose perspicacious comments on my developing ideas helped give form to their inchoate content. The fact that they have acquired a published form is in no small part due to the support he provided during and after the writing of my thesis. I would also like to thank Alan White, my friend and colleague, for his support and generosity of spirit over the years. Thanks also go to my parents for their unceasing encouragement, only one of whom is here to see where it led. Lastly, my thanks go to Joy Wilson for her love, support and forbearance. Without her none of this would have been worthwhile.