BORMAN, David a. - Labour, Exchange and Recognition

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Philosophy & Social Criticism

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2009 35: 935Philosophy Social CriticismDavid A. Borman

Labour, exchange and recognition: Marx contra Honneth

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David A. Borman

Labour, exchange andrecognition: Marx contraHonneth

Abstract This article explores Marxs contention that the achievement offull personhood and, not just consequently, but simultaneously, of genuineintersubjectivity depends upon the attainment of recognition for ones placein the social division of labour, recognition which is systematically denied tosome individuals and groups of individuals through the capitalist organiza-tion of production and exchange. This reading is then employed in a critiqueof Axel Honneths theory of recognition which, it is argued, cannot accountfor the systematic obstacles faced by some struggles for recognition.

Key words exchange Jrgen Habermas Axel Honneth labour lifeworld Karl Marx recognition system E. P. Thompson

Every Hegel must have his Marx. The basic claim advanced in this paperis that Axel Honneth is a Hegelian whose efforts at reviving the Hegeliantheme of recognition in the context of a social philosophy stripped ofthe metaphysical baggage with which Hegel himself was burdened areworthwhile, provocative and one-sided. In fact, the entire debatesurrounding what Charles Taylor famously called the politics of recog-

nition threatens to remain one-sided in this way so long as no similareffort is made to bring Marx to the table. This, then, is my purpose inthis article: to play Marx inadequately, to be sure to Honneths Hegel.

It is not, however, as one might think, Marxs appropriation of themasterslave dialectic in the analysis of class struggle that I will arguecomplements and qualifies contemporary recognition theory. That analy-sis is indeed indicative of an interest on Marxs part in the recognitionproblematic and, until classes exist no more, it suggests an obviousway in which his work remains relevant. Yet that unfashionable topic

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is not the relevance I wish to explore, though not from considerationsof fashion; rather, I intend to argue for the importance of takingcognizance of Marxs insight that the achievement of full personhood and,

not just consequently, but simultaneously, of genuine intersubjectivitydepends upon the attainment of recognition for ones place in the socialdivision of labour. The urgency of this claim stems from Marxs conten-tion, both early and late, that capitalism systematically thwarts suchrecognition through its organization of both production and exchange.

My first concern in what follows is to explain as well as to defendthis position in Marx; but it will also be necessary in this connection todiscuss Honneths (mis)reading of Marx and consequent rejection of hisinsights (section I). This is, in part, why Honneths theory is particularly

inviting as a target among liberal(/communitarian) Hegelians; since unlikeTaylor, for instance, he has not merely ignored Marx but has consideredand dismissed him. In a less direct fashion his debate with Nancy Fraser(recorded in the volume entitled Redistribution or Recognition?) alsooffers clues regarding his thinking on the general relationship betweenrecognition and the systematic economic obstacles to human fulfilmentwith which Marx was predominantly concerned. I will conclude byoffering a critique of Honneth from Marxs perspective aimed at showing,among other things, that because of the way Honneth constructs thecategories with which he analyses struggles for recognition, his Hegeliantheory is in fact resistant to the required Marxian supplementation at avery basic level (section II).

I Capitalism and recognition

According to Marx, the emergence of modern civil society in the over-coming of feudalism leaves human beings living a kind of double life,half in the political world of community and half in the private world

of commerce (and, at least nominally, of conscience). This bifurcation ofsocial life sets loose the forces of production that had been constrainedby the mores of a total social order, in which honour rather than profitwas the organizing principle. As a result, it is not long before the expan-sion of those forces begins to crowd out or trivialize developments inthe social world of community. The three volumes of Capital tell thestory of what happens to human beings once modern, capitalist civilsociety gets under way. It begins with the base unit of capitalism, thecommodity; but it also begins, like Aristotle and Hegel and unlike social

contractarians, with an understanding of human beings as inherentlysocial. Commodities are first defined in accordance with their use-value,their correlation to human needs that is, they are tied from the begin-ning to the context of social exchange and the mutual dependence of

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individuals living in society. While use-values themselves are orderedaccording to a hierarchy of needs and not according to the amount oflabour required to satisfy them, the diversity of use-values as a whole

introduces the need for a standard unit of measurement, a unit ofexchange-value, which quantity of labour supplies.1 The exchange-value,therefore, embodies an abstraction from the use-value of the commod-ity in question, which is to say, an abstraction from its correlation tohuman needs and from the particular nature and skill of the labour thatproduced it. All that remains is the commodity as the embodiment ofabstract labour in some determinate quantity.2

The totality of heterogeneous use-values or physical commodities reflectsa totality of similarly heterogeneous forms of useful labour, which differ inorder, genus, species and variety: in short, a social division of labour. Thisdivision of labour is a necessary condition for commodity production,although the converse does not hold; commodity production is not a neces-sary condition for the social division of labour. . . . Only the products ofmutually independent acts of labour performed in isolation, can confronteach other as commodities.3

Marx notes that exchange-relations that begin as relatively periph-eral to production must become sufficiently widespread such that theycan be taken into account in the process of production itself before asocial division of labour of the relevant sort attains. That is, I mustproduce surplus of a specialized product with the aim of exchanging itin order to satisfy my diverse needs. This means that I must thereforeengage in a form of labour that meets a definite social need, in orderthat my labour maintain its position as an element of the total labour,as a branch of the social division of labour, which originally springs upspontaneously.4 There is a kind of recognition at issue in this: recog-nition through social exchange. Exchange of my products representsrecognition of my fulfilment of a role in the social division of labour, in

the satisfaction of the needs of my community as a whole. Inversely, itis also the condition on the communitys satisfying my needs. The socialdivision of labour, in other words, refers to the at least potentiallysocially integrating mutual dependence of human beings for the satis-faction of their needs. The importance of labour is, as Marx and Hegelagree, more than mere consumption; but it is also, for Marx, more thanthe metabolism of man and nature understood as the dialectical praxisof private individuals. Yet, since quantity of abstract labour time and notuse-value or need satisfaction is the standard of exchange in commodity

regimes, changes in the conditions of production altering the product-ivity or efficiency of labour inclement weather, poor harvests, tech-nical innovations, overproduction have the effect of determining theextent of this recognition for any given producer or class of producers.

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These anti-social social processes, as Marx says, go on behind the backsof producers.5

These magnitudes [of exchange] vary continually, independently of the will,foreknowledge, and actions of the exchangers. Their own movement withinsociety has for them the form of a movement made by things, and thesethings, far from being under their control, in fact control them.6

In other words, there is a tension between recognition, which is in prin-ciple correlated to a social division of labour based on need satisfaction,and a practice of negotiating attempts at or claims to recognition incomplete abstraction from these needs.

Thus it comes about that the social relations that lie at the base ofthe social division of labour are concealed by the emergence of capital-ist modes of production (which I have not yet really discussed in anydetail) and exchange (which, for Marx, is entailed by the form ofproduction, here by privately owned means); and this suppression of thesocial character of labour, manifest in the subordination of use-value toexchange-value, results in the irrationality of a system prone to crisesof overproduction, for example. As E. P. Thompson wrote of the earlyworking class in Britain, from the standpoint of the toilers, it was notthe critique of capitalism and the projection of utopian alternatives thatwas mad, but a social system in which steam and new machinery

evidently displaced and degraded labourers, and in which the marketscould be glutted while the unshod weaver sat in his loom and theshoemaker sat in his workshop with no coat on his back.7 It is truethat these are crises in the material reproduction of society, and that thiswas Marxs focus; but he is far from ignoring their effects upon the indi-vidual, whose attempts at winning recognition (including both recog-nition of their own needs in the form of satisfaction, as well as, inHonneths terms, esteem for their contribution to the social division oflabour) must be mediated by this system, since he is equally and perhaps

even foremost at pains to explain why the capitalist organization ofproduction and exchange are, according to his conception of humanbeings, de-humanizing, resulting in the conversion of things into personsand the conversion of persons into things.8

Since the producers do not come into social contact until they exchange theproducts of their labour, the specific social characteristics of their privatelabours appear only within this exchange. In other words, the labour ofthe private individual manifests itself as an element of the total labour ofsociety only through the relations which the act of exchange establishes be-

tween their products, and, through their mediation, between the producers.To the producers, therefore, the social relations between their private laboursappear as what they are, i.e. they do not appear as direct social relationsbetween persons in their work, but rather as material [dinglich] relations be-tween persons and social relations between things.9

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In order to see this suppression of social relations as a contradictioninherent in capitalism, it is necessary to retain the conception of humannature developed by Marx initially in the Paris Manuscripts, but which

is operative also in Capital.10 It is true, as structuralists will insist, thatMarx claims in several places in the latter that he considers capitalistsand workers alike to be the mere bearers or placeholders in socio-economic processes he describes as the inevitable workings of an estab-lished system of production.11 But it ought to be clear that for Marxthis is the pathological, historical result of an irrational, de-humanizingsystem; it is not an ontology of human society. At the same time, neitherdoes Marx prescind entirely from the intentions of agents in the process:the capitalist, for instance, is differentiated as the one who intentionally

inverts the exchange relation and buys in order to sell, or who produceswith the aim of attaining exchange- instead of use-value (though ulti-mately the goal is to realize profit, surplus value).12 The following passagecontains both of these points in juxtaposition:

As conscious bearer [Trger] of this movement, the possessor of moneybecomes a capitalist. His person, or rather his pocket, is the point fromwhich the money starts, and to which it returns. The objective content ofthe circulation we have been discussing the valorization of value is hissubjective purpose, and it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever morewealth in the abstract is the sole driving force behind his operations thathe functions as a capitalist, i.e. as capital personified and endowed withconsciousness and a will.13

This significantly suggests that the human nature of the person is notexhausted by his or her function as capitalist: the intentions of the agentremain the driving force, yet the perversion of her or his circumstancesis such that only through a complete reduction of the self to a singlesocial role can these intentions be adequately realized. In other words,the capitalist, too, is alienated (a point Marx makes repeatedly14) because

his species-being, his real social nature, is, in Habermas language,colonized by his economic role. He must work long hours at the firm,climb the corporate ladder; he must sacrifice his other interests, his timewith his family, etc. Sensitivity to this feature of Marxs analysis of capi-talism serves to undermine the contention of so many modern writers among whom Honneth may be counted that by the time of Capital,Marxs philosophy is normatively based solely on a utilitarian appealto the interests of the proletariat and hence, once the practical short-comings of that grounding are revealed (in the course of history), we canrespectfully brush Marx aside. There is a distinction to be made betweenthe question of historical addressee (a matter of the relation of theoryto practice) and the normative basis upon which a critical theory itselfis constructed. To offer a parallel: Habermas employs his theory ofcommunicative action in his formulation of the concept of the lifeworld,

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which is said to rely ineliminably on communication for its reproduc-tion; this allows him to identify colonization of the lifeworld by systemas illegitimate (there are additional reasons relating to the integrity of

the individual and his or her cultural context but these, too, come backto the, in this case socializing, role of communication in the lifeworld).But Habermas also uses this two-tiered theory of system and lifeworld,along with the idea of colonization, to explain the existence and articu-late the interests of contemporary protest potential that is, those groupssuch as the environmental movement who, because of their strategicposition in society (along the border of system and lifeworld and, indi-vidually, without heavy investment in core areas of the capitalist econ-omy), both provide confirmation for Habermas social theory and are

likely to be amenable to its message.15

Both levels of analysis are clearlydiscernible in Marx as well i.e. we can distinguish between his desireto appeal to the practical position of the proletariat as an instrument ofrevolution and his theoretical justification of the belief that capitalismought to be undone though perhaps Marx himself was not always asclear and consistent in this distinction as he ought to have been. None-theless, only a remarkably obtuse reading of Capital could issue in theview that Marxs answer there to the question of what is wrong withcapitalism is nothing more than that it offends the interests of a singlesocial class.

The notion of the species-being of human beings and its fate undercapitalism, including now the issue of production, is most explicitlytreated in Marxs early discussion of Estranged Labour in the Economicand Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. There Marx claims that humanbeings are species-beings because they are able to treat themselves asthe actual, living species . . . as a universaland therefore free being.16

It is perhaps less than immediately obvious what Marx intends by this.He seems to begin with two premises, both of which are, again, stilloperative in the later work. The first, noted already, is that human beings

are essentially social.17 The second is that human beings live in and uponnature, through labour. In Capital Marx recalls:

Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process bywhich man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls themetabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials ofnature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces whichbelong to his own body . . . in order to appropriate the materials of naturein a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts uponexternal nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes

his own nature.18

Through this process, one of the changes that may take place is that thelabourer comes to see himself or herself as universal in the peculiarlyHegelian sense that denotes Self-Consciousness; a universal, in this

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vocabulary, is something that is for-itself (understands itself to be) whatit is in-itself (in essence). According to Marx, for human beings it islabouring praxis that allows us to come to an awareness of ourselves

as social beings existing together in dependence upon nature. ThoughMarx often focuses on a single individual in his exegesis of the actionof labouring, concretely at least since the beginning of agriculture10,000 years ago this entails coming to an awareness of our place ina social division of labour. The object of labour, Marx writes, is, there-fore, the objectification of mans species life: for he duplicates himselfnot only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality,and therefore he contemplates himself in a world that he has created.19

This bears on the freedom mentioned in Marxs definition of species-

being, and lost under capitalism, which is likewise to be understood inthe Hegelian sense: in seeing the world as a product of our naturalactivity, in participating through our labour in the creation of a rationalorder, we transform our dependence upon nature not into a nihilisticfreedom or a lack of constraint but into a relation of autonomy, a formof self-recognition that is potentially both individual and collective (aswe consider it to be in democracy, for instance).20 Yet with the emer-gence of capitalist production the worker is divorced from the product,which belongs to someone else. She is alienated from the process, suchthat her mind is no longer engaged and her work is confined to a dis-connected fragment of the whole the meaningfulness of work is lost.As a direct result, she is alienated from her distinctly human (i.e., social)function, her species-being, such that she only feels at home in her animal(i.e., egoistic) functions; her species life is turned into a means to herindividual life she works only in order to survive. And because of allthis, she is alienated from other human beings: In fact, the propositionthat mans species nature is estranged from him means that one manis estranged from the other, as each of them is from mans essentialnature.21

Honneth actually concedes, in a discussion of the various heirs ofHegel less constant than himself, that the early Marx here under discus-sion was, as I have argued, concerned with the problematics of recog-nition, though in a way one-sidedly limited to the domain of labour.

But Marx bases his initial philosophical anthropology on a concept of labourwhich is so normatively charged that he can construe the act of productionitself as a process of intersubjective recognition. In the course of fully inte-grated labour which is conceived of on the model of artistic or craft acti-vities the experience of having an ability objectified is so intertwined with

the mental [geistige] anticipation of a possible consumer that this experi-ence gives the individual an intersubjectively mediated feeling of self-worth. . . in the mirror of the object produced, one can not only experienceoneself as an individual possessed of particular abilities but also understandoneself to be a person capable of providing for the needs of a concrete

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partner in interaction. From this perspective, Marx views capitalism thatis, a single classs control of the means of production as a social orderthat inevitably destroys the interpersonal relations of recognition mediated

by labour. For, in being cut off from the means of production, workers alsohave the possibility for independently controlling their activity torn awayfrom them, control that represents a social precondition for their beingable to recognize each other as co-operative partners within a context ofcommunity life.22

According to Honneth, this view of production, which allows Marx tointerpret attempts to regain the autonomy of labour as struggles for thepossibility of recognition, is renounced in the later Marx. And rightlyso, he believes, since he dismisses it as based on an implausible expres-

sionist conception of human nature, on untenable premises underlyinga philosophy of history, burdensome Feuerbachian ideas of projectionand a psychological error that conceives of abilities as already presentin the mind and subsequently recognized in their objectification. Thelater Marx, he goes on, retains the idea that labour represents not onlythe societal creations of value but also the externalization of essentialhuman energies, but Honneth asserts that he gives up his Feuerbachianconception of unalienated labour interpreted as a kind of loving affirma-tion of the neediness of all other members of the species.23 In its place,Capital offers a purely utilitarian perspective according to which theidea that there is a connection between ones position in the productionprocess and ones moral experiences resulting from disappointed identity-claims is nowhere to be found.24 Since labour no longer entails the recog-nition of others, the struggle between classes for control over productionis nothing more than the conflict of interest positions.

Honneths main contention here has already been dispatched: I havejust finished stressing that, though Marx (surely not wrongly) thoughtthe immediate overcoming of capitalism to be demonstrably in the self-interest of the proletariat and thus that they were most amenable to his

insights into the essential injustice of capitalism, the analysis of Capitalfocuses on capitalism as inherently irrational and de-humanizing, speci-fically because of its anti-social organization of the division of labourwith its effects both on recognition through exchange and recognitionthrough production.25 Moreover, there is no reason to see Marx, asHonneth does, as having naively believed that the (normatively charged)fact of production consummates the recognition of our capacities. Labourdoes indeed objectify species-life, and so the private act of labour mightbe thought relevant to an account of the modes of recognition. Yet given

Marxs insistence on the social character of labour it is clear that, for him,recognition waits upon the actuality and not merely the anticipation ofexchange, the social interaction in which the needs of both parties arerecognized.26 Honneths one-sided picture of labouring individuals, which

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fails to take account of the connection Marx insisted on between formsof production and exchange, undermines our ability to see why Marxalways held the capitalist market to be anti-social and irrational, and

why its irrationality is relevant to the possibility of recognition.27On the issue of production, however, something does, in the end, need

to be said about Marxs development. The discussion of alienated labourin the Paris Manuscripts leads, by way of inversion, to the problematicpicture of un-alienated labour in the German Ideology, that famousimage of the citizen who hunts in the morning, fishes in the afternoon,rears cattle in the evening, and criticizes after dinner.28 As attractive assuch a model was to early workers movements29 and understandablyso Marxs simultaneous acceptance of Adam Smiths analysis of the

leading role of the increasing division of labour in the productivity ofcapitalist wealth makes this model paradoxical since, inferring in theother direction, a society in which such alienation is overcome would,by implication, be an impoverished one. Of course, beyond this, it isalso hard to see how the model could apply to an industrialized, highlytechnical society, with its training and specialized knowledge require-ments. Though Marx did not resolve this issue until Capital, on the basisof the distinction between the division of labour in manufacture (aimedat the creation of surplus-value) and the social division of labour(aimed at the satisfaction of needs), it is important to note that the basicresources for answering it are already there in the Economic and Philo-sophic Manuscripts of 1844; namely, in the claim that being unalienatedis about being able to see oneselfas the universal that is, it is aboutthe ranging of ones mind far more than of ones body. In other words,the meaningfulness of work, which is the heart of the production dimen-sion of the recognition of labour, is about ones ability to see ones workas meaningful. At some point, to be sure, the de-skilling involved inphysical divisions threatens this possibility; but long before that, it is theremoval of control from the worker which, for Thompson as for Marx

(and as Honneth recognizes), is the crux of the disrespect and injuryinflicted by capitalist relations of production. But, once again, Honnethsatomic picture of the labourer prevents the insight attained by bothMarx and the workers movements that Thompson describes: autonomylost at the individual level of the artisan can, once the initial nostalgiafor paternalistic society has been overcome, be regained at the level ofthe collective.30 A labourer who performs one part in a process overwhich she or he, in society with others, exercises control can see thatpart as a meaningful one and can see the satisfaction that that product

provides for others (achieved through social exchange) as a recognitionof her or his labour. Of course, in order to avoid irrational frustrationshere, and the consequent fetishizing of commodities described by Marx,one would need to rationalize the process of exchange as well.31

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II Marx contraHonneth

It might seem that everything I have argued to this point is consonant

with the claim that Honneths recognition-theoretic model merely requiressupplementation by Marxian insights involving the need for recognitionof ones meaningful place in the social division of labour and, perhapsmore importantly, that the nature of capitalist production and capitalistmarkets frustrate this need. Yet it turns out that this task is not sostraightforward. Honneth has not, as Taylor has, simply neglected thisadditional issue; rather, his theory is constructed in such a way as tomake this simple supplementation impossible. It does so in at least threeways: (1) Honneth over-generalizes from claims regarding the motivation

for social struggle to claims about its remedies and aims; (2) he distin-guishes between obstacles to strategic versus communicative success whilerejecting the parallel Habermasian distinction between system and life-world, leading him to discount a priori the possibility of genuinelysystematic obstacles to recognition claims; and (3) his culturalistic crit-icism of the system/lifeworld distinction is overstated on one side, andmisses the more apt opportunity for criticism on the other.

1

It makes good sense, it seems to me, to accept with Honneth that feelingsor perceptions of injustice or disrespect are motivating factors in theemergence of social struggles though, to be sure, this casts little lighton solidarity movements in support of the disrespected by the privileged.And Honneth seems content with this insight about half of the time; forinstance, he argues that what recommends the recognition paradigm isthat it gives an improved insight into the motivational sources of socialdiscontent and resistance.32 In light of the critique of Marx advanced

by the Frankfurt School that the dynamics of capitalism itself pro-vided only the objective but not the subjective conditions for revolt (i.e.they do not account for the required consciousness and motivation ofthe oppressed) Honneths proposal appears to have real merit.33 Theproblem is his too hasty and facile move to conclude from this that,since recognition is what is denied, achieving recognition is the answer:indeed, what could be simpler! Nancy Fraser rightly rejoins that Honnethhas over-generalized his moral-psychological claims regarding motiva-tion, allowing it to determine

. . . how he approaches other key critical tasks, such as identifying hege-monic grammars of political claims-making, the social processes that insti-tutionalize injustice, and the normative criteria for adjudicating claims. ForHonneth, in other words, once moral psychology purports to establish that

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misrecognition is the sole bonafide experience of injustice, then everythingelse follows in train: all political demands must be translated into claimsfor recognition . . . [Similarly, h]e goes from the true premise that markets

are always culturally embedded to the false conclusion that their behaviouris wholly governed by the dynamics of recognition . . . [and] from the validinsight that the capitalist economy is not a purely-technical, culture-freesystem to the untenable proposition that it has no economic dynamics worthanalyzing in their own right.34

So far as economic or labour questions are involved, they have,according to Honneth, to do with disputes over the appropriate inter-pretation of the principle of achievement according to which, in capi-talist societies so we are told recognition of individual capacities is

regulated.35

For Honneth, distribution questions are epiphenomena ofthe pattern of recognized achievement and so struggles for just distribu-tion are cultural struggles dealing with interpretations of this merito-cratic rule.36 To allay the concerns of anyone surprised to hear that,despite all evidence to the contrary, they are living in a meritocraticallyordered society, Honneth will concede that the interpretation of achieve-ment was hierarchically organized in an unambiguously ideological wayfrom the start.37 This includes not only a general rootedness in inter-pretative patterns of the middle class, but also a naturalistic categoriza-tion of womens domestic labour, for example, as outside the pale ofgenuine work deserving of public esteem. Because the meritocratic prin-ciple of recognition contains surplus validity, however, it is also theresource to which these excluded groups appeal in attempting to havetheir achievements socially revalued as something different but worthy.38

He concludes, therefore, that economic-recognition struggles take theform of social groups, in response to the experience of disrespect for theiractual achievements, attempting to throw the established evaluativemodels into question by fighting for greater esteem of their social contri-butions, and thereby for economic redistribution.39 This may well be

true in some number of cases,40 but it ignores the Marxian insight thata capitalist society, geared towards profit and not the recognition ofindividual achievement, systematically undercuts the possibility of fullparticipation by all members of a society and relentlessly devalues anddisplaces individuals skills as a means to greater profits (an example ofthis would be the role of the industrial reserve army that is, thelegions of the unemployed and under-employed in keeping down theprice of labour). Contra Honneth, then, people who have been brutalizedby capitalism, rendered obsolete, forced into meaningless occupations

or simply excluded as superfluous, do not desire recognition for theiractualachievements, but an alternative, an opportunity to actually makea better, more meaningful contribution, a secure means of livelihood thatthey, too, can esteem.41 This brings us to the second issue.

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2

When confronted by Fraser with having ignored the profit motive andthe value blindness of capitalist markets, Honneth first retreats to theclaim that he had sought only to establish that social integration proceedsby way of mutual recognition, and that these processes put constraintson the structure of social institutions. Such institutions are, in turn, thebasis of the moral expectations that members have of their societywhich, when frustrated, can motivate social struggle. While he insiststhat this is not intended to deny the importance of the profit motive, hegoes on to state that he has admittedly conceded a certain primacy tosocial integration as against system integration. I continue to assume,he writes, that even structural transformations in the economic sphere

are not independent of the normative expectations of those affected, butdepend at least on their tacit consent.42 This is a surprisingly Lockeanclaim. Honneth, after all, is wont to cite E. P. Thompsons work, amongothers, in support of his contention that it is a mistake to see either theeconomy or distribution struggles as interest- rather than culture-based;but Thompson would be quite astonished, I am sure, to hear that thesuccess of the industrial revolution and the institution of laissez-faireeconomics was predicated on the tacit consent and not, as he describes,the brutal suppression of the workers and the poor.43

It is nevertheless true that, in Habermasian terms, system as a wholemust, in some way, be anchored in the lifeworld: consent has typicallyplayed second fiddle to false consciousness and, in particular, to thesuppression of alternatives.44 But this anchoring is not sufficient forHonneth: he believes that it is a mistake to see capitalism as a norm-free system of interaction, since the recognition order influences distri-bution.45 As Fraser objects, however, cultural value patterns do notdirectly determine the operations of the market, in which wage-rates, forinstance, fluctuate according to supply and demand, and in relation to

. . . the balance of power between labour and capital; the stringency of socialregulations, including the minimum wage; the availability and cost ofproductivity enhancing technologies; the ease with which firms can shift theiroperations to locations where wage rates are lower. . . . In the broad mix ofrelevant considerations, ideologies of achievement are by no means para-mount. Rather, their effects are mediated by the operation of impersonalsystem mechanisms, which prioritize maximization of corporate profits.46

Honneth responds to this by noting that he does not, in fact, see thelabour market as regulated solely by the meritocratic principle of achieve-

ment: it is also, he claims, regulated by law.47 This rather evidently missesthe entire force and point of Frasers objection. To the extent that thereis any truth to it, the descriptive conformity of the market to legal ormoral norms today demonstrates nothing so much as the deformity and

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impoverishment of the latter. Yet Honneth shrugs off the sense in whichthe meritocratic principle serves ideologically to mask this lack of legit-imacy as though it were some kind of peripheral, historical accident. He

is more interested in insisting once again that it is to this very principlethat the excluded must appeal for leverage, which leads him to claimthat the Habermasian view of the economic system as norm-free actuallyprevents economic processes from being described as open to normativetransformations.48 But normative transformations are, as far as I cansee, not even on the table for Honneth: the changes he has in mind aresimply cases of greater inclusion into a systematically unaltered capital-ist economy. More capitalism, however, is not the answer, nor even despite its relative desirability merely better, gentler capitalism.

Though his Hegelian recognition theory retains the structural formof classical critical theory that is, of an immanent critique concernedto root theory in the practical experiences of violated groups49 hisobliviousness to the systematic aspects of capitalism, and his lack ofinterest in any viable alternative, nevertheless make it hard to see whyHonneth conceives of himself as engaged in critical theory at all thatis, as carrying forward the critical heritage that began, after all, withMarx. His idealistic conversion is consummated in concluding his re-joinder to Fraser with claims like the following:

It is probably most important to make clear that the whole opposition ofsocial and system integration is problematic. It is true that some sociallygeneralized media, like money or political power, can in fact coordinatesocial interaction relatively automatically, but even they depend on somebelief in their legitimacy that can weaken or disappear altogether at anymoment.50

Marx would certainly be the first to observe that this conjuring trickwould likely offer rather meagre solace to those who rely on todays payfor tonights dinner.

Honneths idealism in this regard, his inability to perceive the presenceof systematic obstacles to recognition claims, is just that: an inability,not simply a contingent oversight. At the very general level of category-construction, he claims that obstacles to the fulfilment of recognitionclaims which, recall, result in feelings of disrespect and can issue insocial conflict can be divided, like all human actions, into two(Habermasian) kinds: frustrations of strategic actions, and frustrationsof normative expectations.

Should actions oriented towards success fail as a result of unanticipated

obstructions, this leads to technical disruptions in the broadest sense. Bycontrast, should actions guided by norms be repelled by situations becausethe norms taken to be valid are violated, this leads to moral conflict in thesocial lifeworld.51

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that is to say rather little indeed. The concrete demands of a consistenttheory of recognition must be mediated by a critique of the capitalist anti-social division of labour and the irrationality of the market. As Fraser

concludes,Today . . . economic transformation is out of fashion, as much of the tradi-tional institutional content of socialism has proven problematic. But it is amistake to conclude that we should drop the idea of deep economic re-structuring tout court. . . . In todays neoliberal climate especially, it isimportant to retain the general idea of economic transformation, even ifwe are currently uncertain of its precise institutional content.53

Philosophy Department, University of Winnipeg, Canada

Notes

An earlier version of this article was presented under the title The Genesis andDemands of the Politics of Recognition: Towards a Marxist Hegelianism anda Hegelian Marxism, at the Annual Conference of the Society for Phenomen-ology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), 12 October 2007, Philadelphia. Iwould like to thank James L. Marsh and Saskia Hildebrandt for their commentson that draft, as well as the audience at the conference for their helpful questions.I would also like to thank the anonymous referees for this journal for their helpregarding some points in need of clarification.

1 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I., trans. B. Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books,1977), pp. 1256; hereafter cited as Capital. Initially, only one item expressesits exchange-value at a time, since it does so in terms of the use-value of theother item: 1 table is worth 2 coats this is the result of the perspective ofthe exchanger in ordinary exchange, who seeks the satisfaction of their needs(i.e. a use-value).

2 Of course, Marx notes that this claim needs qualification: if value weredetermined by factual labour time, then the incompetence or laziness of aparticular producer would increase rather than decrease the value of his orher work. We know quite the opposite to hold true (at least in basic produc-tion); therefore it cannot be the labour time necessary for the individualworker but the amount of labour time that is socially necessary given theconditions of production, which determines the value of everyones labourin a given field (Capital, p. 129).

3 ibid., pp. 1323. Marx gives as examples of a social division of labour thatis not in the service of commodity production Indigenous communities and

the division of labour within a farming family.4 ibid., p. 166.5 ibid., p. 201: The social division of labour makes the nature of his labour

as one-sided as his needs are many-sided. This is precisely the reason why

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the product of his labour serves him solely as exchange-value. But it cannotacquire universal social validity as an equivalent form except by beingconverted into money. That money, however, is in someone elses pocket.

To allow it to be drawn out, the commodity produced by its owners labourmust above all be a use-value for the owner of the money. The labourexpended on it must therefore be of a socially useful kind, i.e. mustmaintain its position as a branch of the social division of labour. But thedivision of labour is an organization which has grown up naturally, a webwhich has been, and continues to be, woven behind the backs of theproducers of commodities.

6 ibid., p. 167. Marx writes elsewhere that the dual nature of the commodityis the condition for the rise and fall of the exchange-value of productsindependently of the qualitative hierarchies of needs which, while variable

to some extent across cultures or over a lengthy period of developmentwithin a single culture (usually in the sense of expansion to include newneeds), tends to stability in terms of the internal priority of needs in relationto one another. This is just the opposite of exchange-relations (ibid., p. 137).

7 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York:Vintage Books, 1966), p. 804.

8 Capital, p. 209.9 ibid., pp. 1656. Marx contrasts this with feudal society, wherein

Personal dependence characterizes the social relations of material production asmuch as it does the other spheres of life based on that production. But precisely

because relations of personal dependence form the given social foundation, thereis no need for labour and its product to assume a fantastic form different fromtheir reality. They take the shape, in the transactions of society, of services inkind and payments in kind. . . . Whatever we may think, then, of the differentroles in which men confront one another in such a society, the social relationsbetween individuals in their performance of their labour appear at all events astheir own personal relations, and are not disguised as social relations betweenthings, between the products of labour. (Capital, p. 170)

This relative transparency in feudal social relations is a function of theunified existence of civil and political society, and of the lack of pretencetoward equality. Charles Taylor notes, though he does so solely with respectto relations of status-recognition, that the end of feudalism and the emer-gence of formal equality made recognition an issue by introducing theconditions under which it could be sought and hence refused (see his ThePolitics of Recognition, in Multiculturalism, ed. Amy Gutmann [Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994], pp. 2573 [p. 32]). In a parallelfashion, Marx suggests that the very same structural transformation alsointroduced the possibility for widespread, private attempts to attain recip-rocal recognition of individual labour, as well as the circumstances in whicha legitimate attempt at such could nevertheless fail. Thompson details theways in which the beginnings of class struggle in Britain but only thebeginnings were permeated by a mournful nostalgia for these paternal-istic customs of feudalism according to which, though the lord was assuredtheir dominance, the peasant and artisan were assured their place, too (seeThompson, The Making of the English Working Class, esp. chs 69, 12).

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For a modern equivalent, we can recall the nostalgic reaction against theemergence of largely unregulated capitalism in the former Soviet Union andits satellites, a sense that social solidarity including a guarantee of a job

however much it had been enforced by terror was being underminedwithout recompense.10 Habermas, agreeing with Honneth, claims that Marx gives up the external-

ization model of labour in Capitalin favour of the labour theory of value.In this case the contradiction at the heart of capitalism is the private appro-priation by the capitalist of socially produced wealth. Reification is nowexplained by the transition from a pre-capitalist form of social integration,in which action is coordinated through appeal to traditional social norms,to the capitalist form of system integration through the market. It is thestructure of this market that brings it about that human producers are

subordinated to their products and human relations to the relation betweenthings (that is, reification and commodity fetishism). (See Jrgen Habermas,A Reply to my Critics, in Habermas: Critical Debates, ed. John B.Thompson and David Held [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982], p. 226.)

Habermas portrayal, however, is too stark; as I will argue, there is cleartextual evidence to suggest that Marx continues to operate with a concep-tion of human nature according to which the capitalist instrumentaliza-tion of labour is a kind of teleological contradiction, not entirely unlikeHabermas contention that strategic uses of language such as manipulationcontradict the telos of language and so are normatively criticizable. Never-

theless, at least Habermas explanation has the merit of drawing attentionto the fundamental role of the capitalist market in undermining the possi-bility of intersubjective recognition: this is the key to the argument of thisarticle.

11 Capital, p. 92.12 ibid., p. 259.13 ibid., p. 254.14 See, for example, Karl Marx, Estranged Labour, in Economic and Philo-

sophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. M. Milligan (Amherst, NY: PrometheusBooks, 1988), pp. 6984 (pp. 834).

15 Jrgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. II, Lifeworldand System, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1987).

16 ibid., p. 75.17 Evidence for the continuity of this position can be found in Capital, for

instance, in the claim regarding the ubiquity of cooperative labour in allepochs, and more explicitly in Marxs contention that man, if not asAristotle thought a political animal, is at all events a social animal (Capital,pp. 4434. Marx is clear here that in most societies, cooperation in labourhas been characterized by domination.).

18 ibid., p. 283. Cf. p. 133: Labour, then, as the creator of use-values, as usefullabour, is a condition of human existence which is independent of all formsof society; it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolismbetween man and nature, and therefore of human life itself.

19 Marx, Estranged Labour, p. 77. This is precisely where a gap opensbetween alienation as externalization, as labouring praxis, and alienation

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as estrangement (dispossession of the product and means of production),a gap that Marx accuses Hegel of having idealistically overcome; it is alsowhere we begin to see what is lost in the opaqueness of capitalist social

relations which, insofar as they present themselves at all, do so as natural,unquestionable and as anything but the product of human agency.20 It is nevertheless true that, as numerous critics have observed, Marx often

seems to equate dominance of nature with freedom in a way that is ethicallyproblematic. At the same time, it should be observed that the kind ofcontrol Marx has in mind is notdomination as it has largely come aboutin history: there are resources in Marx for an environmental ethics whichwould critique the capitalist exploitation of nature for the purposes ofexchange-value and surplus value, from the perspective of a communismwhich nevertheless continued to view nature as a use-value for human

beings (which, it seems to me, it would be absurd to deny). Moreover, ause-value in Marxs sense is sufficiently broad to include more than mereproduction of goods; it includes the spectrum of human needs and notsimply the material. This would not satisfy a Heideggerean, of course, sincenature is still en-framed, seen as a resource (even if that includes being aresource for aesthetic contemplation or relaxation), but it may well be amore consistent position for that. It is not unlike the position defended byHabermas (see A Reply to my Critics, p. 241 ff.).

21 ibid., pp. 745, 78.22 Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social

Conflicts, trans. J. Anderson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), p. 146.23 ibid., pp. 1489.24 ibid., p. 149. Honneth, I should note, argues that Marx actually returns to

expressivist themes in the later political writings without ever being ableto reconcile it with the purported utilitarianism of Capital(ibid., p. 150).

25 Marxs own theoretical descriptions of his mature project often enoughsound reductively materialistic, but it is at least equally clear as Habermasalso observes (see Knowledge and Human Interest, trans. J. Shapiro [Boston,MA: Beacon Press, 1971], chs 23) that his empirical analyses of capi-talism take seriously the role of culture, of communication structures andinstitutions, of ideology, of what have been called the hidden injuries ofclass. It may be that Marx never fully resolved the tension between thesetwo perspectives; nevertheless, Honneths periodization of Marx is notmerely overly simplistic, but is actually erroneous.

26 It is also worth noting, I think, that Honneths claim that Marx relies onan improbable psychological model is unnecessarily rigid and uncharitableas a reading. Surely there is nothing so implausible about the claim thatpersons engaged in all sorts of activity experience recognition and affirma-tion from labour that makes a difference, or leaves a mark on the world(the social or the natural world). This participation in shaping the world,if it is autonomously directed and meaningful, is very simply what Marx,I would argue, sees as being systematically undone by capitalism. Beyondthe obvious plausibility of claiming that this is a component of any mean-ingful life and any fully developed personality, there are empirical studieswhich, in broad outlines, support this view (see, for instance, Report of a

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Special Task Force to the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, inWork in America [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973]; F. Herzberg, Workand the Nature of Man [London: Staples Press, 1968]; Studs Terkel,

Working[New York: New Press, 1972]).27 The irrationality of the system Marx is criticizing is in fact rooted in justsuch false individualism, for in it rational individual choices actually worsenthe collective predicament after the fashion of the tragedy of the commons which is precisely why collective action and social solidarity represent theonly alternative. Those two well-known and callous bon mots of Britishneo-conservative Margaret Thatcher belong together that is, it is true thatThere Is No Alternative (TINA), as long as it remains true that there isno such thing as society.

28 Karl Marx, The German Ideology, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 2nd

edn, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 185(translation altered).29 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, pp. 7889.30 Ultimately, Thompson shows, not even Luddism was a blind rejection of

modernizationper se, but the demand that the inevitable pains of the processbe mitigated by rational, social direction (ibid., ch. 12). More to the point,from the very beginnings of the emergence of true class consciousness, themovement had ceased to be backward-looking in its outlook and insteadcommenced with

an acceptance of the enlarged productive powers of steam and the mill. What

was at issue was not the machine so much as the profit-motive; not the size ofthe industrial enterprise but the control of the social capital behind it. Thebuilding craftsmen and small masters [for example], who resented control andthe lions share of the profits passing to master-builders or contractors, did notsuppose that the solution lay in a multitude of petty entrepreneurs. Rather, theywished the co-operation of skills involved in the building to be reflected in co-operative social control. (ibid., p. 804)

Thompson also notes that essential to this control was the not alwaysexplicit . . . [but] dangerous tenet: production must be, not for profit, butfor use (ibid., p. 830). This is dangerous, of course, because it is nothingshort of the destruction of the essence of capitalism.

This also ought to sufficiently answer the objection sometimes raisedagainst Marx that he defended a form of labour derived from a romanti-cized image of the artisans who were all but extinct by the time he waswriting. Since this form of labour could not sustain modern society, itsloss is nothing more than the unavoidable growing pains of society; moreimportantly, so the objection goes, any attempt to offer such an image asan aim for the future is therefore anachronistic and wrong-headed. Thisobjection was raised against an earlier version of this paper, presented atSPEP in 2006. A similar argument is also offered by Honneth in what isotherwise his most sympathetic treatment of Marx, much of which appearsto have been abandoned by Honneth in more recent discussions (see Workand Instrumental Action in The Fragmented World of the Social(Albany,NY: SUNY Press, 1990), p. 22ff. As we have just seen, though the autonomyof the artisan no doubt contrasted attractively with the modern forms of

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labour with which Marx and those who endured the growing pains ofsociety were familiar, the solution to the problem of alienation to be foundin his work, and which the workers themselves hit upon, is neither nostalgia

nor acceptance but radically new forms of cooperation and collectivity.Habermas, as I have already mentioned, also criticizes Marx for basinghis theory of labour on a romantic and outdated conception of the artisanwhich he claims, citing Honneth, has been displaced by industrial labour.

Correspondingly, the concept of labour has been purged of all normative contentin industrial sociology and has been discharged from the role of an emancipa-tory driving-force in social philosophy. If we add to this the trends towards short-ening working time and towards a corresponding devaluation of the relevanceof labour within the lifeworld, then it becomes evident that the historical devel-opment of industrial labour is cutting the ground from under the philosophy ofpraxis. But if the production-aesthetic revaluation of industrial labour becomesirrelevant, the whole problematic shrinks to the sober, social-political size of ahumanization of the working world. (Habermas, A Reply to my Critics, p. 225)

Habermas offers no justification for the remarkable claim that labourhas become less significant for the lifeworld of whom? While indeedcompulsory working time has been shortened in Developed nations, at thesame time, particularly in the heavy industries that Marx described (but also,increasingly, in the professions), working continues to dominate the majorityof the time of workers lives. (See, for example, Juliet Schor, The Over-worked American: the Unexpected Decline of Leisure [New York: Basic

Books, 1991].) In a comment like this, one suspects the distorting influenceof academic distance from the reality of working life for the majority ofpeople for whom, unfortunately, labour is indeed experienced as entirelydrained of normative content.

Nevertheless, it seems to me essentially correct that the humanizationof the working world is what is at issue. Honneth, in the work alludedto above (Work and Instrumental Action), attempts to reinterpret thecritical conception of labour formulated as praxis in terms of the feelingsof disrespect experienced by workers who are victims of capitalist instru-mentalization. These feelings motivate resistance strategies that are widelydocumented in industrial production (work stoppages, slowing the line, etc.).But, Habermas claims, even if we assume that the aim of such resistance isautonomy, the justification for such a transformation would have to appealto the logic of practical discourse and not to the model of the appropriationof externalized powers, even reinterpreted recognition-theoretically. Work-place autonomy has to do with the relations of production, the structure ofdomination, and so must ultimately be judged according to the norms ofsocial interaction. I am inclined to agree that this is the ultimate normativebasis of autonomy; but the justification in discourse may not be quite asdirect as Habermas seems to suggest. In another context, he recognizes thatindividuals who are otherwise cognitively capable of participation in dis-course will be prevented from doing so if they are not able to secure recog-nition for their needs and identity at the similarly postconventional level (atwhich discourse proceeds); (see Moral Consciousness and CommunicativeAction, trans. C. Lenhardt and S. Weber Nicholsen [Cambridge, MA: MIT

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Press, 1990]). But this holds a fortiori for political discourse as well, throughwhich diverse citizens are normatively integrated. In other words, while itmay well be that it is only through participation in discourse that autonomy,

even workplace autonomy, is ultimately justified, nevertheless the recog-nition for ones needs that can be attained only through the achievementof workplace autonomy may actually be a precondition of participationin such discourse, a precondition of the stabilization of ones identity as amember of society. This is particularly clear with respect to the connectionbetween the recognition of the skills of immigrants and the extent of theirsocial integration. Honneth himself notes something similar in another paper(see The Social Dynamics of Disrespect: Situating Critical Theory Today,in Habermas: A Critical Reader, ed. Peter Dews [Oxford and Malden, MA:Blackwell Publishers, 1999], pp. 32930, 334).

31 Though it is perhaps unnecessary to offer additional suggestions for thecontinued relevance of this recognition-possibility to be drawn from Marx,it is worth noting and this is yet another indication that the physicaldivision of labour processes is of secondary importance that the alien-ation of labour in precisely Marxs sense has only spread since Marxs timeand has been widely documented in empirical social studies: in the serviceindustry (see George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society [ThousandOaks, CA and London: Pine Forge Press, 1996]); in the colonization of themedical industry by HMOs that circumscribe the treatment and diagnosticoptions of physicians (see Simon Head, The New Ruthless Economy: Work

and Power in the Digital Age [New York: Oxford University Press, 2003]);in the bureaucratization of education, etc. In addition, if I can suggest asomewhat extreme but illuminating empirical support for the negativeclaim that the performance of meaningless work is experienced as de-humanization: it has been reported by survivors that the use of senselessor meaningless labour in Nazi concentration camps was found to be amongthe most effective ways of demolishing the sense of human selfhood (seePrimo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996],including esp. the Afterword).

32 Axel Honneth, Redistribution as Recognition: a Response to Nancy Fraser,trans. J. Golb and J. Ingram, in Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Profile (New York: Verso, 2003), pp. 11097 (p. 125). Seealso ibid., p. 131, where Honneths discussion of research trends supportinghis thesis all stress the motivational role of disrespect resulting from frus-trated expectations of society in preference to ascribed interest positions.

33 Once again, however, Honneths statement of the issue is misleading: heclaims that the lesson of the Frankfurt School was that the shift of emphasisfrom the interests of the proletariat to the practice of social labour wasinadequate, since the practice of social labour could not automaticallyproduce an emancipatory interest and itself tended toward the reificationof consciousness (The Point of Recognition: a Rejoinder to the Rejoinder,trans. C. Wilke and J. Ingram, in Redistribution or Recognition?, pp. 23767[pp. 23940]). What is at issue here under the heading social labour is,as far as I can tell, the concentrated conditions of work in a factory, withits highly specialized divisions of the production process, modelled on the

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division of labour in manufacture. This objective condition, Marx hadthought, would lead to the emergence of a subjective consciousness ofexploitation: but the reason for that, whether borne out in practice or not,

is that this division of labour is anti-social and de-humanizing. The turn toKulturkritik by the Frankfurt School leaves the question of a genuinelysocial division of labour as an aim of transformation totally unaddressed,as, of course, does Honneth himself. (In a short paper on the situation ofcritical theory today, written before the debate with Fraser, Honneth verysuggestively argues that a new, revitalized conception of labour and itsimportance is required, one that avoids both the pitfalls of Marxs roman-ticism but also the trivialization of labour that he sees in Habermas theoryof communicative action. The concept Honneth has in mind should beserviceable for explaining the importance that recognition for ones labour

holds in the development of personality [which is evident, inversely, in thetraumatic psychological effects of unemployment]. However, though he doesnot in this paper articulate this conception himself, his concluding sugges-tions tell us well enough that it is none other than the entirely culturalizedconception he employs later in the debate with Fraser: the discussion begunby feminists regarding unpaid domestic work, he claims, is the most im-portant field for the articulation of this conception; and, as we know, theproblem with such unpaid domestic work, according to Honneth, is entirelyunsystematic; it encounters nothing more than prejudice in the value systemof a culture. See The Social Dynamics of Disrespect, p. 330 ff.)

34 Nancy Fraser, Distorted Beyond All Recognition: a Rejoinder to AxelHonneth, in Redistribution or Recognition? , pp. 198236 (see pp. 206,216).

35 This is the result of the political displacement of questions of individualstatus, which is itself the result of the emergence of formal equality in legalrelations, a development which Marx, too, discusses in the first section ofOn the Jewish Question (first published in 1844). It is perhaps worthnoting that Habermas argues that contemporary society has, in recognizingthe market to be an unreliable negotiator of equal recognition, shifted theburden onto education: equal opportunity for achieving qualificationsthrough education is the condition on the acceptability of the meritocraticpattern of the distribution in the economy/occupational sphere. For thisreason (among others), the place of education (as a practice) and the school(as an institution) in society ought to be tremendously important for contem-porary critical theory. My own research project at present is concerned withthis issue.

36 Honneth, Redistribution as Recognition, pp. 137, 140.37 ibid., p. 141.38 ibid., p. 153.39 ibid., p. 154; emphasis added.40 Even where it is true, however, so far as I can tell there are still no pure

cultural cases; rather, the ideological distortions are always functional insome way (often in very surprising ways) for the reproduction of society.For instance, Paul Willis details the way in which sexism serves to vindicatethe desirability of manual labour in unpleasant conditions for working class

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males who freely choose it, despite their awareness of its inherent meaning-lessness, as an expression of their masculinity. Other forms of labour areaccordingly coded as cissy, or effeminate and therefore (as associated with

women) undignified or less worthy of respect (see his Learning to Labour:How Working Class Kids get Working Class Jobs [New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1977], ch. 6). From the perspective of women, then, it isquite true that prejudices regarding the nature of labour in the minds of menprevent the revaluing of their social contributions (typically naturalized, asHonneth and Willis agree); yet it cannot be ignored (as Honneth consist-ently does) that the sexism that prevents this revaluing and which perhapseven more crucially prevents solidarity among the working class servesa crucial legitimation function that capitalist society cannot simply dowithout. In a liberal democracy, workers cannot credibly be seen as being

straightforwardly or openly coerced into the choices that, in the end,reproduce their class; the sexism of working class culture is, according toWillis analysis, one of the key tools by which the needs of reproductionare met through the uncoerced (if not entirely free) choices of citizens.

41 In a similar vein, Nancy Fraser aptly remarks that Honneths culturalizedaccount has nothing whatever to say to the worker who loses her job as aresult of a speculative merger, yet who rightly feels that recognition of hercontribution to society has been callously denied and this, of course, is anot uncommon occurrence in a system governed exclusively by the pursuitof profit (see her Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics: Redistri-

bution, Recognition, and Participation, in Redistribution or Recognition?,pp. 7109 [see p. 35]).42 Honneth, The Point of Recognition, p. 250.43 Honneth claims that [s]ince the central institutions of even capitalist societies

require rational legitimation through generalizable principles of reciprocalrecognition, their reproduction remains dependent on a basis of moralconsensus which thus possesses real primacy vis--vis other integrationmechanisms (Redistribution as Recognition, p. 157). It is remarkablewhat a perversion of Thompsons insights is to be found in such a claim.Thompson, from whom Honneth borrows the expression moral consensus,uses it to refer to the solidaric values of communities uprooted and destroyedby the Industrial Revolution in Britain; he, like Honneth, is at pains to indi-cate by this that resistance to these changes was not the result of calculatedinterest positions. But Thompsons book culminates in the betrayal of themovement which grew out of that consensus, its shattering at the hands ofa police state that incarcerated, beat, murdered and deported people, madea compromise with the middle class and, finally, succeeded in imposing itsvision and interests upon the people. For Honneth to suggest that that impo-sition itself relies on a moral consensus, or a process of rational legitimation,is wrong-headed to put it mildly (see Thompson, The Making of the EnglishWorking Class, especially, in this connection, the first and last chapters).

As for the issue of reproduction itself, it seems Honneth is again over-generalizing: it is certainly the case that social integration proceeds, by andlarge, by reciprocal recognition; but it is absurd to claim that the reproduc-tion of capitalist institutions proceeds similarly. It is presumably Honneths

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culturalizing of the economic that leads him to suggest such a thing, thoughit is indeed far from obvious that even ordinary cultural reproduction canbe attributed to reciprocal recognition, rather than, at least more directly,

to an array of instruments of socialization. It is clear, in any case, that thecentral institution of capitalist society, the institution of class, is perpetu-ated on the basis neither of the moral consensus of society nor of rationallegitimation. Willis offers a far more sophisticated and dialectical explana-tion of the reproduction of class which, like Honneth and Thompson, seesworking-class culture as more central than mere interest, and which eschewssimplistic reductions to false consciousness or to coercion, yet which doesnot whitewash the fact that working class (and increasingly, I would add,middle-class) workers end up alienated, entrapped and excluded from thewealth they create and from those who enjoy it. For Willis, the central insti-

tutions of capitalist society are, in the end, reproduced by the systemsexploitation of the long-term deformity of a near-term collective learningprocess in working-class culture, which is itself predominantly a reactionto the institution of the school and its values under capitalism. In the shortterm, the oppositional culture that develops among working-class kids inand against the school eases the transition to the working world, which iseven celebrated as a kind of freedom; in the longer term, the truth that itis in fact enslavement comes simultaneously with the fatalistic belief thatit is now too late to escape. (Increasingly, for young people of the middleclass, or generally for those who accept the culture of the school, the

disjunction between the meritocratic promise of education-as-qualificationand the realities of alienated white-collar work in Taylorized and surveilledcorporations retains the more immediate character of a simple Bait andSwitch, as Barbara Ehrenreich has titled her new book on this topic.)

44 For a similar argument regarding the lack of actual legitimation in moderncapitalist societies, which are stabilized instead through fragmented con-sciousness and a widespread sense of a lack of alternatives (in this caseoffered as a criticism of Habermas theory of social integration in Legitima-tion Crisis), see David Held, Crisis Tendencies, Legitimation and the State,in Habermas: Critical Debates.

45 Honneth, Redistribution as Recognition, p. 142.46 Fraser, Distorted Beyond All Recognition, p. 214.47 Honneth, The Point of Recognition, p. 251.48 ibid., p. 252.49 Honneth has detailed his understanding of the nature of critical theory in

several places; for the most succinct version of which I am aware, see TheSocial Dynamics of Disrespect.

50 ibid., p. 255.51 Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, p. 137.52 Honneth himself had, much earlier, raised this very concern in a relatively

Marxian critique of Habermas. However, Honneth has evidently sinceabandoned the position on which this critique was based, particularlyregarding its comparatively charitable reading of Marx as well as its muchbroader account of the critical interest of labour (see Work and Instru-mental Action, p. 45ff). For criticisms of the ontologization of the system/

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lifeworld distinction see, for example, David Ingram, Habermas and theDialectic of Reason (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press,1987); James L. Marsh, Whats Critical about Critical Theory?, in

Perspectives on Habermas, ed. Lewis Hahn (Chicago, IL and LaSalle: OpenCourt, 2000), pp. 55567; Raymond A. Morrow and Carlos Alberto Torres,Reading Freire and Habermas: Critical Pedagogy and Transformative SocialChange (New York: Teachers College Press, 2002).

The system/lifeworld distinction is, in fact, less straightforward thanmany common criticisms suppose. I cant offer more than a brief summaryhere of a reading of Habermas which I intend to defend in detail elsewhere.But it is nevertheless worth mentioning at least the following: Habermasexplication of the system/lifeworld distinction, in both Legitimation Crisisand in The Theory of Communicative Action, is methodological rather than

directly substantive in nature: that is, these terms refer to a difference oftheoretical perspectives and not to segments of reality. However, when theeconomy is organized according to a market system and the politicalapparatus as a bureaucracy, these social subsystems become impervious tothe hermeneutic methods which produced the concept of the lifeworld.Even then, Habermas insists that the need to conceptualize such subsystemsfrom within the perspective of systems theory ought not to prevent us fromseeing that there are normative dimensions to the economy, for instance,in the relations of production which characterize the occupational sphere(see Legitimation Crisis, trans. T. McCarthy [Boston, MA: Beacon Press,

1975], p. 6). Nevertheless, it is the historical fact of the capitalist organi-zation of production and exchange, and not a sociological a priori onHabermas part, that requires of participants that they adopt a strategicattitude (toward maximizing personal gain) and of theorists that they turntheir attention to the functional (or dysfunctional) interweaving of actionconsequences.

Things stand differently with respect to the lifeworld, which is not asymmetrical construction: Habermas has not defended the claim that thelifeworld is a haven of communicative action; his position, instead, is thatthe reproduction of the lifeworld requires a more or less counterfactual

presupposition of orientations toward communicative action on the partof interaction partners. Empirical relations of power are parasitic uponthese presuppositions. It must be admitted that Habermas use of languageis very much to blame for the misunderstanding, in particular, his claimregarding the uncoupling of system from lifeworld. However, the realcritical problem in Habermas is not ontologization, but his limitation ofcritique to the problem of colonization, and his consequent acceptance ofthe internal structure of the capitalist economic system.

53 Fraser, Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics, p. 74.

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BORMAN, David a. - Labour, Exchange and Recognition