I.
The net effect of the scientization of the Economic
is, as we have pointed out, to confine the concept of freedom to the human
emancipation from economic “necessity”, ultimately from “labour-as-toil”, by
making necessity rather than coercion the opposite of freedom, and therefore to
remove freedom from the Political; and then consequently to bind
freedom to the psychological rubric of human interiority, to the
“freedom of the will” and to “freedom of thought”. This neat scientistic and
ideological reification of “economic science” as “necessity” – “the
dismal science” – pits human beings as Subjects against a static Object,
Nature, in that it reduces the essential objectification of human being
as living activity to an immediate opposition that is frozen in time
– or rather, a conceptual opposition that freezes historical time,
one that becomes an opposition of a logical and philosophical
character removed from any real sensuous historical mediation or
“interaction” (Habermas) between human beings on one side and their environment
on the other. Just as the Kantian Subject cannot penetrate the inscrutable
“thing” that is locked “in itself”, so Pure Reason cannot com-prehend Practical
Reason, which is the Kantian sphere of freedom, without that transcendental
“leap of irrational faith” (Fichte’s projectio per hiatus irrationalem)
that gives rise to what Lukacs disdainfully labelled “the antinomies of
bourgeois thought”.
It is evident that once again we are approaching – this time
from another angle – the fundamental problem of bourgeois thought, the problem
of the thing-in-itself. The belief that the transformation of the immediately
given into a truly understood (and not merely an immediately perceived)
and for that reason really objective reality, i.e. the belief
that the impact of the category of mediation upon the picture of the
world is merely ‘subjective’, i.e. is no more than an ‘evaluation’ of a reality
that ‘remains unchanged’, all this is as much as to say that objective reality
has the character of a thing-in-itself…. Even more
important, however, is the other side of the question, viz. that the thing-in-itself
character of the form-content relation necessarily opens up the problem
of totality….We see the unhistorical and anti-historical character of
bourgeois thought most strikingly when we consider the problem of the
present as a historical problem. (G. Lukacs, HCC, passim,
pp.150-1)
For her part, and much to her credit, Arendt was keenly alive
to the difficulty with Kant’s idealism – and indeed suggested a practical,
immanent path out of the antinomic impasse, similar to what we are
espousing here:
To the question of politics, the problem of
freedom is crucial,
and no political theory can afford to remain unconcerned
with the
fact that this problem has led into "the
obscure wood wherein
philosophy has lost its way." It is the
contention of the following
considerations that the reason for this obscurity
is that the phenomenon
of freedom does not appear in the realm of
thought at
all, that neither freedom nor its opposite is
experienced in the
dialogue between me and myself in the course of
which the great
philosophic and metaphysical questions arise, and
that the philosophical
tradition …has distorted, instead of clarifying,
the very idea of freedom
such as it is given in human experience by
transposing it from its
original field, the realm of politics and human
affairs in general, to
an inward domain, the will, where
it would be open to self-inspection. (ibidem)
Yet, just as causal determinism has no bearing on the concept
of freedom (because, once again, as Arendt attests, if all is determined, then
we may safely assume or pretend that nothing is), then also the Lukacsian
notion of historical totality – one that he borrowed from the Hegelian
and Marxian dialectic – has all the pre-destined irrelevancy of eschatology: in
short, it is not history (Geschichte) that Lukacs canvasses but destiny
(Schicksal; Heidegger will later harp on history as a destiny “sent” [Geschick,
and Geschenk, as in “present, gift”] by Being) itself through “the individual
subject-object of history”, the proletariat and its “class consciousness”. For
Lukacs, not only does the proletariat overcome the antinomies of bourgeois
thought by removing the immediacy of the subject-object opposition through its
“consciousness” of the historical dialectic of class struggle (Marx), but also in
overcoming this bourgeois reification or hypostasis of historical reality – the
present as history (cf. Paul Sweezy’s homonymous work) – it achieves an authenticity
– a “true” rather than “false” consciousness – to which the partial one-sided
interests of the bourgeoisie cannot gain access.
But this insistence on the socio-psychological or, if you
like, the philosophico-anthropological aspect of Marx’s theory of alienation
and the ensuing fetishism of commodities leads straight to the existentialist
riposte along Kierkegaardian lines advanced and formulated by Heidegger in Sein
und Zeit. The insuperable objection raised first by Kierkegaard against
Hegel and then by Heidegger against Lukacs, quite possibly as a direct rebuttal
of the Hungarian (see L. Goldmann, Lukacs et Heidegger), is that once we
subject present social reality to a psychological critique – as distinct from,
say, a scientific or economic one -, then we come across the problem of the
Unicum, that is, of the uniqueness of human individual experience which no
psychological theory can ever hypostatize into social categories. The
Heideggerian Da-sein, in fact, exasperates the Lukacsian late-romantic critique
of capitalism from a Hegelian-Marxist dialectical and revolutionary position to
one that is intensely existential and even religious: Heidegger openly conceded
that he was “a lay priest” and that his Being was only a secular substitute for
the Divinity whilst the Dasein stood for a convoluted version of Duns Scotus’s “living
Spirit”. And with this we have reverted back to our starting point – the Johannine
concept of the Logos.
So let us resume our discursive trajectory of the
relationship between the political concept of freedom as opposed to coercion,
and the attempt of bourgeois “economic science” to establish “objective
economic necessity” as the true contrary of freedom, as its limit. It is
Habermas’s great merit to have shown that Lukacs’s notion of “class
consciousness” cannot serve as “the individual subject-object of history”
because indeed this notion is too abstract and teleologico-eschatological to be
of any concrete use in the critical analysis of capitalism and its eventual
supersession. To recapitulate, Marx’s inability to determine “value”
and “prices” independently of the market “mechanism” induced him to seek the
“objectification” of value in the “fetishism of commodities” which served the
same purpose as Weber’s “rationalization” – that of “measuring” the social
synthesis, which is what Lukacs translated into the concept of “reification”.
Just as with Weber’s “rationalization”, the Marxian concept of “commodity
fetishism” or the Lukacsian equivalent of “reification” simply cannot account
for “the social synthesis”. To be sure, Marx and Lukacs did understand
that if this “social synthesis” is objectively valid – if, in
other words, it is possible “to measure” value independently of political
institutions, of violence -, then capitalism would be made scientifically
legitimate and the only objection to it would rest with its efficiency
as a mode of production of social wealth. What they failed to consider, however,
is that if, on the contrary, this “social synthesis” is achieved through a
“necessary illusion” (fetishism of commodities, reification, formalism), then
we have a contradiction because no “illusion”, – let alone a “necessary illusion”,
which is an oxymoron! - can ensure this “social synthesis”, that is to say, the
material reproduction of that social system !
Lukacs perceives this problem when he
asserts, albeit still from the viewpoint of the opposition of “fragmented
alienated labor” against the (lost!) “totality of artisanal
labor”, that “the limit to reification is its ‘formalism’” (in HCC, p.101).
Habermas understands Lukacs’s statement to mean that workers are aware that the
“reification” of labour time is “an illusion”, however “necessary” it may be
“objectively” and that therefore the bourgeoisie cannot be “the individual
subject-object of history”. As if “history” required anything like “individual
subject-objects” for exploitation to occur! (Nietzsche would have a fit if he
ever read Lukacs!) Quite obviously, Lukacs’s analysis does not deal with the
problem of capitalist coercion because, as Habermas rightly notes, Lukacs
attempts to overcome this formalism only philosophisch – through “class
consciousness”, which entails substituting one “illusion” with another, because
it is hard to see how the “necessary illusion” of reification could ever become
“un-necessary” and clear the way to true “class consciousness”! (The old Frankfurt School realized
this, only to preserve the idolatry of “[Instrumental] Reason”. See
Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, Vol.1.)
The only way to lend validity to
Lukacs’s position is to reflect that the “formalism” of reification, of the
mythical law of value, will defeat capitalism for the precise reason
that what makes it possible is a reality of class antagonism,
of capitalist command or coercion over living labour that ensures the abstraction
of living labour as a marketable commodity, as labour-power. In other words,
there is no “real” or “necessary” illusion behind reification
but the naked blunt violence of the capitalist – Weber’s “regular
discipline of the factory”. This is why formalism is the limit of capitalism:
- because “rationalization” is not an “objective” (Weber) or merely
“ideological” (Marx-Lukacs, then Heidegger-Marcuse) phenomenon, but rather
(with Nietzsche’s invariance, the “unreality” of values) an arbitrary
one that responds to a strategy of command and exploitation.
We shall deal with the process
whereby capitalist command can be administered or directed “rationally”
according to “the laws of economics” presently. Lukacs does in fact, at the
page reference cited by Habermas, seem to indicate “formalism” as the internal
limit of the wage relation in terms of the fact that “the market
mechanism” metamorphoses living labour into a “thing” but only
“formally”, only “abstractly” – not “in reality” or “necessarily” – and must
therefore succumb to the “reality” of class antagonism! It is true that both
Marx and Lukacs ultimately fall into this vicious circle of “market
competition” leading to “abstract labor” and then to “value” as a “necessary
illusion” – an operation that is impossible because “competition” cannot automatically turn
living experience into a “thing”. Habermas, however, completely fails to see
that this is the real political problem and instead of seeking
to explain what in fact can achieve this transformation he engages in a
critique of Lukacs on the ground that the reality of “reification” (which
Lukacs has rendered identical with Weberian “rationalization” because of his
erroneous acceptance of “market competition”) cannot be “dispelled” by a
mythical “class consciousness”! By so doing, Habermas demonstrates how little
he has comprehended what is the actual problem posed by the wage relation and, consequently,
also with Lukacs’s concept of “reification” (and, we must add, Marx’s
“fetishism”). The actual problem, the Gordian knot of capitalism to be untied
is how living labour can be coercively reduced to the commodity labour-power by
means of “market forces”, that is, through the violence of the wage relation
that has been institutionalised into a predictable – “rational-scientific”! -
framework of “market competition” or, worse still, of “the self-regulating
market mechanism”!
II.
The oxymoron of “necessary illusion”
to describe the “fetishism of the commodity” and “reification” is the
mirror-image of the Marxian notion of “historical materialism”: on one side the
phenomenon of “value” is an “illusion”, that is, it is a subjective product of
human “history”, whilst on the other side it is “necessary” because it
exemplifies the objective and material “economic
laws of motion of society” (Marx in the “Preface to A Contribution”). Because
Habermas accepts the “scientific” basis of historical materialism based on the
mistaken distinction he draws between “instrumental action”
and “interaction” or “reflection”, he can then accept this oxymoron as
indicating the “historical necessity” of the “commodity form” at a given stage
of “the natural history of society”! Here is the proof in his own words:
Marx did not adopt an epistemological perspective in developing
his conception of the history of the species as something that has to be
comprehended materialistically. Nevertheless, if social practice does not only
accumulate the successes of instrumental action but also, through class
antagonism, produces and reflects on objective illusion, then, as part
of this process, the analysis of history is possible only in a
phenomenologically mediated (gebrochen) mode of thought. The science of man
itself is critique and must remain so. (K&HI, ch.3, p.62)
What this reveals, of course, is Habermas’s ingrained “transcendental
objectivism” – derived mainly from Neo-Kantian sources, chiefly Simmel’s
“social forms“ – that afflicts his own analytical framework. Here is Habermas
again:
To the degree that the commodity form becomes the form
of objectivity and rules the relations of individuals to one another
as well as their dealings with external nature and with internal subjective
nature, the lifeworld has to become reified and individuals degraded – as “systems
theory” foresees – into an “environment” for a society that has become external
to them, that has consolidated for them into an opaque system, that has been
abstracted from them and become independent of them. Lukacs shares this
perspective with Weber as with Horkheimer; but he is convinced that this
development not only can be stopped practically, but, for reasons that can be
theoretically demonstrated, has to run up against internal limits:
“This rationalization of the world appears to be complete, it
seems to penetrate to the very depths of man’s physical and psychic nature; but
it finds its limit in the formal character of its own rationality”. [HCC, p.101]
The burden of proof that Marx wanted to discharge in
politico-economic terms, with a theory of crisis, now falls upon a
demonstration of the immanent limits to rationalization, a demonstration
that has to be carried out in philosophical terms,” (Habermas, TCA, Vol1,
p.361).
Again, Habermas is wrong because the
context in which Lukacs discusses this “formalistic limit” to rationalization
is precisely that of Marx’s theory of capitalist crisis induced both
by class antagonism in the labour process and
by inter capitalist competition in the “market”! As a
matter of fact, on p.102, very shortly after the passage cited by Habermas,
Lukacs goes on to cite Marx on this very point!
Division of labor within the workshop implies the
undisputed authority of the capitalist over men, who are but parts of a
mechanism that belongs to him. The division of labor within society brings into
contact independent commodity producers who acknowledge no other authority than
that of competition, of the coercion exerted by the
pressure of their mutual interests,” (Marx, Capital III, quoted in Lukacs,
HCC, p.102.)
Of course, neither Marx nor Lukacs would
ever succeed in showing scientifically, as opposed to politically,
how “the market mechanism” can “function”, how “competition” between
capitalists can ever provide “the social synthesis” for the
reproduction of capitalist society in any form whatsoever, least of all that of
“value”! Value is either a political notion or it is nothing at all, of no value
whatsoever! For this reason, they rely on the notions of “fetishism” and
“reification”, respectively, to provide the foundation for that comprehensive
“irrationality” constituted by the capitalist wage relation – which is why
Lukacs can then fall prey to and swallow wholesale (word for word, really) the
“Rationalisierung” of a Weber, albeit to denounce its “formal limits”!
It is much simpler for us, instead, to attribute the social synthesis of the
society of capital to the sheer violence of the wage relation, imposed through
a network of capitalist political and social institutions all of which answer
ultimately to the stability of money-wages and the price and monetary system.
But this does not mean that Habermas
has identified this real apory in Marx’s and Lukacs’s theories
– the aporetic notion of “labour value” as the foundation of the social
synthesis of capitalist reproduction through market competition. And this
failure, we argue, is a direct result of Habermas’s persistent wrong focus on
the “philosophical”, “idealistic” and Neo-Kantian theorization of the
whole quaestio of “reason and rationalization” as a “discrepancy”
(Missverhaltnis) between “laws of nature” or epistemology and “laws of
society” or social theory, rather than on the political antagonism of
the wage relation!
Habermas is entirely right to chide
Lukacs’s “idealistic” reconciliation of theory and practice in the “class
consciousness” of “the individual subject-object of history”, namely the
proletariat (p.364). But he completely misses the point that
the “contra-diction” in capitalist social relations is not predominantly one
that concerns “communicative action or competence”: instead, it is one that is
intrinsic to the politics of the wage relation itself! Perhaps
the worst that can be said of Habermas’s “meta-critique” of Marx and Lukacs is
that his own notion of “communicative action” remains trapped in the voluntarism of
“consciousness”, of morality and aestheticism:
It is characteristic of the pattern of rationalization in
capitalist societies that the complex of cognitive-instrumental rationality
establishes itself at the cost of practical rationality; communicative
relations are reified. Thus it makes sense to ask whether the critique of the
incomplete character of the rationalization that appears as reification does
not suggest taking a complementary relation between cognitive-instrumental
rationality, on the one hand, and moral-practical and aesthetic-practical
rationality, on the other, as a standard that is inherent in the unabridged
concept of practice, that is to say in communicative [p.364] action itself,”
(TCA, Vol.1, pp.363-4).
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