The LRB has an essay by Professor Nancy Fraser of the New School titled-
After Habermas
Jürgen Habermas may be variously described as the moral conscience of postwar Germany,
make cars not war. It doesn't take much moral conscience to do that which pays better.
the last great systematic philosopher,
if you base everything on 'communicative acts', you need a theory of communication or else you are an ad hoc philosopher. You aren't 'systematic'. Since communication is information theoretic when it isn't strategic (game-theoretic), a systematic philosopher needs to show what are the preconditions for 'signalling', 'screening' & things like 'zero-knowledge proof'. This is mathsy stuff but it also means a systematic philosopher who has taken this road can explain things like the 'law of increasing functional information'.
the dominant figure in the second generation of the Frankfurt School
which was shit.
and the thinker who brought that ‘school’ to an end.
It ended when the SDP adopted the Bad Godesberg program in 1959. Collective ownership of the means of production was off the table. There was convergence to Mixed-economy, Keynesian Welfarism. Everything was now econometrical. Politicians had to spout Statistics & pretend to care deeply about inflation or devaluation or whatever. Saying 'eat the rich!' wasn't enough.
Others can and will reckon his contributions at that grand scale. What I have to offer is more specific: the reflections of a leftwing North American member of his circle on what she learned from him and what she could only learn by looking elsewhere.
Was anything she learned useful? No. She taught nonsense to stupid people.
My ties to Habermas were multi-layered. He was an inspiration and a role model; a mentor and an antagonist; a figure who showed me early on how to practise ‘critique with an emancipatory intent’ but from whom I eventually had to distance myself.
He wanted pedants do to donkey work. They wanted to pose as too cool for Skool.
I first encountered Habermas’s thought in the mid-1970s when I was a PhD student and aspiring philosopher. Fresh out of the New Left,
i.e. making life better for work-shy homosexual drug addicts. To be fair, Nancy is more 'second wave' Feminist. She dislikes the crazy third-wavers just as much as the rest of us.
I was in search of an intellectual framework that could anchor my political commitments and contribute to ongoing struggles to realise them.
It was Economics- in particular the theory of wage/price/service provision discrimination. The solution is to raise general purpose productivity till factor supply becomes so elastic that there can be no rent extraction or monopsonistic discrimination. Alternatively, you can go down a Coase & Posner 'Law & Econ' road & work on bringing class action suits based on evidence of statistical discrimination.
Two figures loomed large on the scene: Habermas and Michel Foucault.
Neither knew Math or Econ or Law. They were useless.
Working through their respective insights and blind spots, I came to see myself as a critical theorist. It was under the sign of Frankfurt,
Which part of Frankfurt? The Red Light district? That's where my friend Praful Joshi studied. He achieved Red Enlightenment so often that his money ran out & he had to return to Mombasa to run the family business.
I thought, that I could best pursue my project.
Hopefully, she didn't meet Praful there.
Unlike Foucault, Habermas offered the prospect of a ‘reconstructed historical materialism’.
despite being ignorant of history
He conceived postwar capitalist society as a totality,
It featured a lot of 'Duality' & was ab ovo a 'mixed economy'.
riven with contradictions and crisis tendencies,
That may have been true of pre-war Capitalism but Keynesian demand management had triumphed along with Bretton Woods & strong cooperation between Central Banks.
even as he also rejected economic reductionism.
Because he was ignorant of economics.
Foregrounding ‘communication’ as distinct from ‘labour’,
Though plenty of people get paid to communicate while others are employed on maintaining & improving communication technologies.
and ‘lifeworld’
developed by Husserl & Schutz. The latter was influential in American Sociology. I think 'representative agent' theories in Econ are Schutzian.
as distinct from ‘system’,
or 'structure'. Both can have a graph theoretical representation.
he posited the relative autonomy of culture, ideas and politics,
Stalin posited the relative autonomy of Language & culture. But politics is about 'collective action problems'. It is economic when it isn't mere squabbling.
while also theorising their ‘colonisation’ by bureaucracy.
The German bureaucracy is a fearsome thing. But the DMV is truly the lowest depth of Hell.
The result was a novel critical theory of welfare-state capitalism
He thought the Welfare State would tame the antagonism between worker & employer. He was wrong. Generous welfare payments forced the better class of employers to offer 'efficiency wages'. The worst employers had to be content with immigrants & drug addicts. The problem was that Welfare States had an incentive to go for 'over-full' employment which was inflationary. Thus it turned out that the real 'class war' was between elderly folk living off their savings & the young 'boomers' who could borrow at negative real interest rates. Once the old exerted political power, the tables were turned on the young.
– the perils it posed and the prospects it opened for emancipation.
Indeed. Many slaves on Southern Plantations were able to escape to the North thanks to tickets on the Freedom Railway given to them by the Department of Health and Human Services
A synthesis of Marx,
who was wrong about everything
Weber
who, along with Hugo Preuss, ensured that the Weimar Republic would turn into a 'Caesarean' Dictatorship
and speech-act theory,
Which thinks we obey rules when we speak. We don't unless we teach grammar or are afraid peeps will think us ignirint.
Habermas’s theory lent systematic heft to New Left intuitions,
Shame they had become adversely selective of imbecility. Kids in Reagan's America wanted to get rich- preferably by performing rap songs about killing cops.
on the one hand, and to Foucault’s dazzling figurations on the other.
Foucault was genuinely puzzled as to why people with power didn't use that power to torture virgins the way De Sade & Giles de Retz had done. Obviously, some occult force was restraining them. Also how come I kiss Mummy instead of stabbing her repeatedly? Fuck is wrong with me?
Other intellectuals
who had shit for brains
of my generation also found inspiration in this synthesis.
of shit.
But I was less interested than most in the normative level of Habermas’s edifice. While others embraced ‘discourse ethics’ to ground freestanding political theories of democracy and law,
keep saying 'Israel is totes illegal' & maybe the Jews there will take the hint & run away.
I remained focused on the critique of ‘late capitalism’.
of a type which Reagan & Thatcher put out of its misery.
Not much moved by Between Facts and Norms (1992), I wrestled instead with The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962),
Which I have discussed elsewhere.
Legitimation Crisis (1973)
There was nothing of the sort. The problem was that the Arabs & Venezuelans & so forth wanted a better price for their oil. Legitimacy wasn't the problem. Stagflation was.
and the chapter on ‘the internal colonisation of the lifeworld’ in The Theory of Communicative Action (1981).
Taking lots of drugs enables you to resist this. Sadly, you may end up sucking off sailors at the docks to pay for your habit.
Structural Transformation taught me to historicise, and problematise, the institutions that appeared to generate the consent of the dominated in capitalist society.
This was already being done by the guys who ran those institutions. They faced 'Baumol cost inflation'- i.e. tendency for non-tradeable services to rise in price relative to tradeable goods. The solution was to make services tradeable- e.g. Indian call centres.
‘The internal colonisation of the lifeworld’ taught me to understand capitalist society as an institutionalised social order,
like every other type of society which features institutions. It must be said, the German 'Historical School' had similarities with 'Institutionalist' Econ in the US. At one time, you needed German to get a PhD in Econ. I think Harvard only dropped this & put in a Math requirement around 1960. Habermas was a good enough donkey of the German variety- i.e. as stupid as shit but giving good scholarly apparatus.
comprising state and economic systems, public and private lifeworlds, all demarcated by boundaries that were moveable and subject to contest.
If there is a demarcation, there must be demarcation criteria. What are they? Nancy can't tell us anymore than I tell you where the boundary lies between the Buffy the Vampire slayer part of me and the Beyonce part of me.
Legitimation Crisis taught me to identify forms of capitalist crisis beyond the economic – crises of political legitimation, to be sure, but also, by extrapolation, crises of social and ecological reproduction.
If you can't turn everything into a crisis, you aren't a hysterical nutter. However, shitting yourself and screaming your tits off is a desiderata.
In these works, I found the Habermas I was seeking – the one who was helping to invent an unorthodox democratic Marxism for a new time.
One which wasted no time on reading her shite.
It was never a perfect fit. Having already signed on to Richard Rorty’s radical historicism,
pragmatism not historicism. Still, everything he wrote was meaningless so why quibble?
I had little sympathy for attempts to establish ‘normative foundations’ for critical theory in the anthropological depths of a putative human disposition to seek agreement via communication.
Yet 'coordination problems' exist. A bunch of guys who don't solve at least some of them soon go extinct. Anthropology is stooopid. Evolutionary Game Theory is not.
My aim, rather, was to clarify the historically specific conjuncture we inhabited
she was living in some bizarre 'conjuncture' of her own, while the rest of us were voting for Reagan or Thatcher.
– and to disclose possibilities for emancipation within it.
She could have been emancipated from studying & teaching worthless shite.
Writing on the public sphere, I challenged Habermas’s neglect of transnational and ‘subaltern counterpublics’,
why didn't he undergo gender reassignment surgery to show solidarity with Dalit Hijras in Haryana? Was it because he was a RACIST?
while scrutinising their capacity to pierce bourgeois hegemony.
by stabbing them & stealing their cool, shiny, stuff?
On the colonisation of the lifeworld,
Men have colons. Women have vaginas. We want the vaginisation of the lifeword.
I felt that, in essentialising the system/lifeworld distinction, he masked historically specific forms of male domination and missed the transformative potential of feminist movements.
Also he was masking the incessant rape all women are subjected to by the 'male gaze'- more particularly if the male in question is Praful Joshi.
In both cases, I sought to reopen the space foreclosed by him for a democratic-socialist alternative to ‘late capitalism’.
i.e. fisting yourself while screaming your tits off about how Israel is totes evil.
If the first intervention was well received, the second led to a breach that lasted five years.
During which Nancy created a democratic-socialist alternative to 'late capitalism'. Sadly, the Taliban stole it from her. Afghans can be very sneaky.
In the meantime, the world was changing. As the ‘pathologies of juridification’
e.g. Jews not being killed in Concentration Camps
gave way to the chaos of neoliberalisation,
see above
critique needed to shift as well.
to gassing on about transgender peeps in the Turd World piercing or sodomizing bourgeois hegemony.
Crisis critique, especially, needed reviving.
Habermas is dead. Why? Capitalism refused to abolish death so as to make money out of the Funeral business.
How else to grasp such glaring system ‘dysfunctions’ as global pandemics
Which began when our species began
and planetary heating,
which Graciella Chichilnisky showed could be tackled by Carbon trading.
skyrocketing debt
which is the other side of the coin of skyrocketing financial assets
and nosediving wages,Wages in the United States increased 4.60 percent in January of 2026 over the same month in the previous year. Wage Growth in the United States averaged 6.15 percent from 1960 until 2026, reaching an all time high of 15.54 percent in April of 2021 and a record low of -6.12 percent in April of 2020.
retrenched public services
Baumol Cost-disease. The workaround is making the thing tradeable.
and decaying infrastructure,
which requires investment not scolding
hardened borders
protecting real wages for unskilled workers
and persecutory scapegoating,
like Biden trying to put Trump in jail?
de-democratisation and militarisation, genocide and hot war – and how else to grasp them not as contingent ‘bads’ but as non-accidental outcomes of capitalist dynamics?
You could simply say everything is the fault of the Jews. Did you know that the Pope is Jewish? So is Ayatollah Khameni. Trump himself is a Rabbi. That's why, as he says, the Iranians offered him the job of Supreme Guide.
In search of non-economistic forms of crisis theory, I landed once again on Habermas.
rather than Hitler. Good choice.
Legitimation Crisis had the great merit of grounding my generation’s shift to ‘post-materialist’ values in the structural-institutional transformations of capitalist society.
i.e. living in your own fantasy world where you have teamed up with Karl Marx & Shulamith Firestone to sodomize the Great Spaghetti Monster until it says 'boo to Capitalism!'
But two of its principal theses did not ring true. I was convinced neither that a political crisis of legitimation had displaced an economic crisis of accumulation,
Accumulation is a good thing. There's a crisis of legitimation if the Army isn't obeying orders & Revolutionaries are hanging Cabinet Ministers from lamp-posts.
nor that democratic citizens should replace oppressed subalterns as the primary agents of transformation.
Yet, that's what happened in India- the birthplace of subaltern studies. Just when Dalits & Tribals were becoming Chief Ministers, these nutters started pretending that Dalits & Tribals (& all women, according to Spivak) could not speak.
I turned elsewhere: to Gramsci on hegemony and counterhegemony;
Meaningless shite. The Italian Communists should have given up their 'Workers' Control' stupidity.
to Althusser on ideology;
kill your wife to combat Capitalism
to feminist theorists on social reproduction;
how come men are still refusing to give birth to babies? Is it because Capitalism is surreptitiously putting wombs into girls because it needs babies to be born so as to enslave them & make the work long hours in factories or coal mines? Fuck you, Capitalism! Fuck you, very much!
to eco-Marxists on capital’s ‘natures’;
e.g. the cunning way Capitalism is using beavers to beaver away at building dams. Did you know 'beaver' is a term for vagina? Connect the fucking dots, sheeple!
to Daniel Bell and Luc Boltanski on its cultures;
Let me guess. Are they wicked? I suppose so.
to Rosa Luxemburg and W.E.B. Du Bois on racialised imperialism;
Which disappeared long ago.
to Edward Said
who settled in Turtle Island.
and Rashid Khalidi
who handed back his American real estate to members of the First Nations- thinks nobody at all.
on settler colonialism;
i.e. the US of fucking A.
to Karl Polanyi
who thought the slave economy of Dahomey was marvellous.
on fictitious commodification and social struggle;
His brother was a good Chemist & Economist.
to David Harvey on neoliberalism;
Why not David Icke?
and to Marx on the logic of capital.
Did you know the capital of logic is Mogadishu?
And yet I felt that Habermas was somehow with me at every step.
Because he was equally stupid.
Habermas first lit my path as a critical theorist.
Rather than as a lighted fart.
I remain deeply grateful for that.
But no one is grateful that Nancy turned into a hysterical shithead though, admittedly, there are crazier & stupider people. Look at Amia Srinivasan.
But over the years the light he cast flickered and waned – until, with his stance on Gaza, it seemed to go out.
Germans should cheer when Jews are raped & decapitated.
Historians will eventually decide whether that stance was an anomaly or the culmination of a long process in which Frankfurt School critical theory turned into a form of liberalism that was too often complicit with US imperialism.
Moreover, it sucked off the American Emperor who is descended from King George Washington.
I’m inclined to side with those who hold that Habermas at first revivified critical theory
by saying there's some rule involved in communication such that if only we talk enough stupid shit, everybody will agree to collectivize everything.
but ultimately ended it. If so, he nevertheless inspired, by his extraordinary presence and intensity of thought, many
useless shitheads
who remain committed to ‘critical theorising with emancipatory intent’ and to the democratic-socialist ideals associated with it.
Mamdani read Habermas- thinks nobody at all. Mamdani is cool.
Some of us may no longer be Habermassians, but we learned from, with and against him what it means to keep faith with critique.
No. You became part of a Credentialist Ponzi scheme which is now collapsing. Still, you did well out of it. It is your student's students who will pay the price.
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