User:NickelBank/IFCI/HabermasServedBourgeoisState
Jürgen Habermas: The philosopher who chose the state
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- field, scope, or group [Item]
- date
- 2026-04-01
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Motifs or claims
- Stalin's pamphlet Dialectical and Historical Materialism is one small part of a grotesque falsification of Marxism; Lenin's annotations on Hegel's Template:Science of Logic, the Philosophical Notebooks, are much better [2] [3] [4] -> there's a vague irony in Trotskyists accusing Habermas of wildly revising Marxism and then making such big claims against Stalin.
- Read Trotsky before bashing Stalin / If you haven't read Trotsky you can't hold up Stalin's work as the specimen that disproves Marxism (Trotskyism, meta-Marxism) / To overlook the work of Trotsky is to flatten and misrepresent Marxism / (9k)
- Habermas did not write about how to prevent fascism [5] -> I'm not so sure about that. whether his analyses are correct or not, I think that topic is the stated reason most people read him.
Motifs or claims (Habermas)
- republic as natural crime / a politically criminal system (Jürgen Habermas) [6] -> young Habermas freed from Nazism. realizes it's bad. then proceeds to analyze Nazism through the lens of foreign imperialism and categorize it as a "crime" against global society to be punished by external armies and siphoning tax dollars out of welfare and into the military. which encourages shifting all economic growth into the military and creating bigotry against all industries that actually stand for peace. who's going to tell him?
Q88 named nationalism + natural crime = republic as natural crime. - Habermas thought he believed in Western Marxism [7] / Habermas said he drew from Lukács (), Korsch (), Bloch (/), Sartre () and the Frankfurt School () / Today I value being considered a Marxist (Habermas 1979) -> that sounds about right to me. so if he ultimately supported the values of classical Menshevism... that says a lot about Western-Marxism, doesn't it? you have to ask, in practice, if there's really any substantial difference between Western-Marxism and Menshevism or whether they're basically the same. I feel like except for a narrow little slice of it around Gramsci, the answer is no, and Gramsci before going to prison is like the only Western-Marxist who has ever been able to present something that actually functions as a variation of Leninism, even if it's a bit shaky and a bit led by the bourgeoisie or the three 'petty classes' Lenin was trying to phase out circa 1919. if all of them are class traitors you maybe have something, even if there are a ton of ways it could go wrong.
- We must radically rewrite Marx / We must revise Marx / Marx's theoretical framework requires fundamental correction [8] / Why radically rewrite Marx? (sense VI) -> whenever someone insinuates this you really have to ask "why?". that will tell you a great amount about their philosophy.
I swear whenever somebody wants to justify revising Marx they almost always try to make it look better by throwing in the word "radically" — if you believe something is 'radical' then it must actually be progressive rather than incorrect. by 2010 everyone left behind the word "radical!" to describe things except anarchists and critical-theorists, who are still deeply convinced it's 'pretty rad'. - First World countries got rid of obvious class antagonisms / Advanced capitalist countries (First World countries) will not have a Leninist revolution because they have gotten rid of the proletariat, but the specific way they got rid of the proletariat was simply in getting richer and getting rid of the relationship between oppression and a visible underclass; this is to imply that oppression can still be studied strictly outside the study of production relations -> I'd actually give you the first claim, but the second claim is absolutely not the reason for it. I don't know about Germany, but the United States definitely got rid of the proletariat by guarding jobs harder (possibly starting at the Red Scare and ideological reasons) and making it harder to get into jobs to the point it was easier for people to try to become experts or small businesses than fight over precious existing job slots. First World people's "wealth" only really bought them useless education and the tools to compete against each other, but didn't really make them more able to earn money from either work or sales, it just increased antagonisms between individuals.
isn't this... what Bernstein said? there was somebody who said this in the time of classical Menshevism and I want to say it was Bernstein. - The labour movement had been institutionally pacified (Habermas) [9] -> objection! [10] if countries getting richer took away the class struggle, meaning there's no proletarian movement to begin with, then there isn't any workers' movement to pacify, is there? those two things make no sense when put together.
- Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism (Habermas; Communication and the Evolution of Society)
- Sociality existing refutes Marx / Marx can't reduce society to production inputs because humans are distinguished from other animals by sociality; for some undefined reason this means that economics operates based on sociality rather than based on the motions of existing as material objects / Economics requires norms that can be set intersubjectively at the level of linguistic understanding (Habermas) [11] -> oh god what an anarchist way to regard society
that does not follow at all. humans practicing sociality does not mean that economics can't be an artifact of sociality not permeating every part of society and the base behaviors of Animals peeking through such as territorial competition of individuals or small fragment populations (prides, etc). it doesn't mean that at all. riddle me this Habermas, if what you say is true, why do people presenting economics in egoistic framing that would totally dismantle Liberal-republicanism a bit at a time even exist? what's generating them if what you say is true? - If I've decided to study the whole historical period between two social transitions, then a theory of social transitions cannot explain history or societies in general and another theory of history is required [12] -> this man does not know what a shovel dream is and has buried himself in a specific shovel without knowing why that's bad
- A theory of social transitions can't explain how people stop picking on homosexuals -> this is the most charitable reading of what Habermas says. somebody who sets out to do a study specifically of Liberal-republicanism becomes caught in the issues that Liberal-republicanism finds the most difficult to solve, and begins to assert that because they're difficult to solve inside Liberal-republicanism Marxism couldn't solve them either, because surely if Marxism only applies at transition points it couldn't solve something so far out of its scope it's hard to solve in the theory that 'picks up the slack'. of course, that's not really how ideologies actually work. different ideologies actually have different moving parts inside that make them different. in this respect Trotskyists are a lot closer to applying Marxism correctly, because they actually start from the fundamentals of Marxism when applying Marxism.
- Social formations can be classified according to their level of moral-practical consciousness -> okay. I don't like that claim, but at least it's a concrete claim of some sort that can be analyzed. which is a real achievement as far as critical-theory is concerned.
so, like... applying this. I'm thinking. are you trying to tell me that people form monarchy because they conclude that warring states periods are morally wrong? that statement could vaguely apply to the history of Buddhism I guess, so there are no problems yet. then you're trying to say that people form Liberal republics because they conclude that monarchy is morally wrong, or the back-and-forth religious feuds that go on beneath monarchy. but Liberal-republicanism doesn't really get rid of those, it just slightly changes their form and maybe makes them worse. Liberal-republicanism slowly pushes people to stop thinking in terms of religion, so in order to restore order and prosperity they start thinking in terms of what group of people is destroying the nation from within or without, and begin to think in terms of ethnic superiority and demographic inferiority. is that really a forwards development? it's easy to say religion is morally wrong because it encourages empire in order to unify large kingdoms or empires of people under the same moral code (God, Buddhism, etc). it's also easy to say religion is morally wrong in that Christianity gives towns and households tools to bend people to their will in fear of being cast out. but when you get rid of religion, people become aware of the real reasons they're already persecuting others and just start justifying the real reasons instead of making up fake reasons. a lot of people get this wrong, and start to claim that getting rid of religion makes people worse, when really it makes them exactly the way they were before except more honest. the development of society into rationality and away from superstition paves the way for global empire, as people realize that war is morally wrong and you can stop wars and "terrorist attacks" if you simply beat up other countries before they get you; with this new development in morality Third World countries are no longer treated as sovereign nationalities or ethnicities with the right to make their own decisions or develop society their own way, and only sheer groups of individuals that, gun to their heads, must produce wealth and become modern, educated, specialized, and not-treading-on-anything-claimed-by-any-individual-on-earth or else have their entire population brutally attacked. as global empire develops, people gain the moral consciousness that wealth and the "wealthy, educated, industrial, democratic" worldview is inherently good, and enshrine the ability to have a reasonable income and to own property or choose an area of expertise and let that arbitrarily decide what city or country you'll live in as a right of all humans. as a result, millions of millions of people across the world all joined together in agreement of what forms of culture are acceptable in a republic and what forms are bad, and launched horrific attacks on the Soviet Union, Vietnam, Cuba, East Germany, and to a lesser extent on China and North Korea. the world's moral consciousness was high but it was not complete, therefore significant numbers of Soviet people and Eastern Europeans and a few people from Vietnam and North Korea were displaced to other countries. but this is going to be fixed.... how? morality is incapable of considering countries thought to be immoral through cultural relativism, so logically it's going to look more like all the countries that are being treated the worst right now being cracked open and assimilated into other countries, and only treated well once they have smashed their old societies and become part of the new global "morality society". if people turn against Israel it'll look like sending First World armies into Israel and attacking Israelis until they surrender and hand the war outcome to Palestine. it won't be pretty. I had this thought in the past couple of days that when countries are increasingly dodging international "law" by operating through blue anarchism and every capitalist just 'spontaneously deciding' to boycott a country, the only way you're going to get more moral behavior toward Cuba is to make blockading Cuba illegal and outright take companies away or put people in prison for it. I think with this framework that possibility totally applies. to close the contradiction of corporations blockading Cuba just because they're not allowed to take it over, you have to either allow the United States to informally annex Deng Xiaoping states so everyone can agree on the same morality that U.S. people will force Cubans to accept, or start a crazy crackdown on all businesses where the government absorbs them if they don't behave morally toward Cuba and if they don't successfully pack up their capital and flee the country to become unaccountable. that could end in an international war. a weird "German split" where a bunch of First World countries invade the United States and try to stop the initiative to make businesses behave morally toward Cuba so businesses won't get expelled from their countries. or maybe the other countries would get scared to attack directly and they'd like, launch some kind of giant lawsuit or something — some kind of bizarre superficially-nonviolent measure that if it was successful would still hurt. one of the only things that would actually hurt is to block all Third World imports so that in effect a bunch of stuff is not getting produced. there are a few possible outcomes of this hypothetical period. 1) the United States becomes a Deng Xiaoping state. all the businesses become state businesses and it restores relations with Cuba. 2) the United States purges itself of big businesses and truly becomes the land of small business hell. it cracks under the other countries' pressure to grant absolute freedom to businesses, but doesn't want to grant other countries control over it, so it just lets the big businesses bleed out of it while creating a bunch of teeny tiny businesses to fill the void, bound together by the most gigantic capitalists ever. the sea of small businesses most likely resumes blockading Cuba and becomes totally insufferable in its philosophical values. 3) workers and unemployed somehow miraculously take over the United States and stop the moral-business-controllers or sea-of-artisans scenarios. this outcome seems very unlikely, and I could only imagine it happening based on international interactions. out of everything, I think small business hell is going to win the morality roulette because that's truly what's the most morally appealing to the widest number of people. everyone really hates big businesses, but owners and consumers all love "indies".
on one hand he's right. I mean, that theory does explain why a lot of major historical events happened since 1776. but it doesn't really lead humanity to good results as much as utterly horrifying ones that never seem to get any better. I think you'd have an easier time using this to argue that morality is immoral and ethics is unethical than that morality both predicts history and leads humanity to good outcomes.
Subjective themes
- Habermas was basically a Menshevik / Jürgen Habermas used principles of Marxism to build critical-theory and argue for the legitimacy of the overall German republic as a Liberal republic or ethnically-neutral secular state constructed as a "nation of ideas"; [13] ideologically, he was basically an ally of classical Menshevism in that he abused the principles of Marxism to argue for reconstructing or reforming Liberal-republicanism, not to aid the construction of an "East Germany"