User:NickelBank/IFCI/HabermasServedBourgeoisState
Jürgen Habermas: The philosopher who chose the state
- author
- field, scope, or group [Item]
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/ Trotskyism
(top-level category)1-1-1 - critical theory ( / ES)1
-1-1 - date
- 2026-04-01
Links
- WSWS:
Nickel usage or significance
- (fill in later)
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 -> there's a vague irony in Trotskyists accusing Habermas of wildly revising Marxism and then making such big claims against Stalin.
- Habermas did not write about how to prevent fascism [2] -> 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) [3] -> 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 [4] / 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 [5] / 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) [6] -> objection! [7] 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)
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"; [8] 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"