The real Neo-Marxism
Sep. 28th, 2006 12:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusLocal man sometimes is. As we discovered yesterday, it's not so much that I refuse point blank to be interested in what's going on around me in Germany. It's that I'll pay attention to it when it's interesting. This produces a paradox: I'll agree to be local only when the local culture produces something of global significance.
The Germany I love is the Germany which has, occasionally, achieved that. Take the Frankfurt School. This group of New Left intellectuals -- Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Marcuse, Fromm -- made a worldwide intellectual impact in the postwar years. If there's such a thing as "Frankfurt School Pop Music", my early records are it. "The Man on Your Street: Songs from the Career of the Dictator Hall", for instance, couldn't have been made without Adorno's book "The Authoritarian Personality". The more introspective Momus records that followed drew heavily on Adorno's "Minima Moralia". (How could one man have written such different books? From the empirical to the diaristic, from the pragmatic-propagandistic to the subtly doubtful and despairing.) And Marcuse's concept of "repressive desublimation" has been bobbing in and out of Click Opera regularly recently, a useful mallet to hit our "compulsory fun", party-at-the-back mullet culture with.
So what would the titans of the Frankfurt School make of today's America, and today's Europe? Would they still believe in the inevitability of Marxist revolution? We know the answer, because one of them is still around. Jürgen Habermas, the youngest of the Frankfurt School intellectuals, is 77, and still active. "His work," says Wikipedia, "sometimes labelled as Neo-Marxist, focuses on the foundations of social theory and epistemology; the analysis of advanced capitalist industrial society and of democracy; the rule of law in a critical social-evolutionary context; and contemporary – especially German – politics."
As a student, I made a circle around Habermas. His work always seemed more grey, subtle, abstruse and meta than the great generation of Benjamin and Adorno; Habermas' thing is epistemology and hermeneutics -- in other words how we know what we know, who says so, and how we decide what's rational. He doesn't think revolution is inevitable; if it comes, it'll be based on people acting spontaneously in their own rational interests. Unfashionably (in a postmodernist and relativist era), Habermas believes that rationality can, to all intents and purposes, be underpinned by something we can think of as universal and objective -- an enlightened intersubjectivity, at the very least.
So far, so dull. But what of praxis? Well, recently Habermas has thrown himself behind the campaign of Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt for a United States of Europe. As reported in Sign and Sight, Habermas kicks away the idea that to let Europe drift without a constitution, or to have no army, is to be neutral. That, he believes, is to be spinelessly complicit:
"If we are not able to hold a Europe-wide referendum before the next European elections in 2009 on the shape Europe should take, the future of the Union will be decided in favour of neo-liberal orthodoxy. Avoiding this touchy issue for the sake of a convenient peace and muddling along the well-trodden path of compromise will give free reign to the dynamic of unbridled market forces..."
The same goes for Europe's military effectiveness:
"Only a European Union capable of acting on the world stage - and taking its place beside the USA, China, India and Japan - can press for an alternative to the ruling Washington consensus in the world's economic institutions. Only such a Europe can advance the long overdue reforms within the UN which are both blocked by and dependent on the USA. It is precisely in critical cases of joint action that we must break free of our dependence on our superior partner. That is one more reason why the European Union needs its own armed forces. Until now Europeans have been subordinated to the dictates and regulations of the American high command in NATO deployments. The time has come for us to attain a position where even in a joint military deployment we still remain true to our own conceptions of human rights, the ban on torture and wartime criminal law."
In other words, we need to remilitarize in order not to be complicit with America's tendency to invade and to torture.
I find this interesting, especially when we take it into the Japanese context. If Habermas is "the real Neo-Marxism", we see him fundamentally reversing the positions of our friend David Marx on the misleadingly-titled Neomarxisme blog. Neomarxisme is pro-business and anti-militarist, whereas Habermas is anti-business and pro-militarist. In the Japanese context, perhaps Habermas would see the non-militarism of the Japanese constitution as America's way to ensure that their own militarism goes unchallenged. While it's certainly true that Japan's desire to re-militarize is being actively encouraged by the American regime, it's a strategy that could backfire for the Neocons if, for instance, Japan used its new clout to challenge imperialism and torture, and to demand a return to the norms of international law, the Geneva Convention, and so on (as Habermas suggests a Europe with a defense minister would do).
I'm also interested to see that the first act of "remilitarizing hawk" Shinzo Abe is a highly positive one: he's moving to set up a meeting with South Korea, in an attempt to do what Koizumi so signally failed to: mend relations with Japan's Asian neighbours. Imagine a United States of Asia and a United States of Europe, both with armies, and both demanding that the renegade US return to the framework of international agreements and the rule of law. Only the strong can keep the peace, and only the united can be strong.
The Germany I love is the Germany which has, occasionally, achieved that. Take the Frankfurt School. This group of New Left intellectuals -- Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Marcuse, Fromm -- made a worldwide intellectual impact in the postwar years. If there's such a thing as "Frankfurt School Pop Music", my early records are it. "The Man on Your Street: Songs from the Career of the Dictator Hall", for instance, couldn't have been made without Adorno's book "The Authoritarian Personality". The more introspective Momus records that followed drew heavily on Adorno's "Minima Moralia". (How could one man have written such different books? From the empirical to the diaristic, from the pragmatic-propagandistic to the subtly doubtful and despairing.) And Marcuse's concept of "repressive desublimation" has been bobbing in and out of Click Opera regularly recently, a useful mallet to hit our "compulsory fun", party-at-the-back mullet culture with.So what would the titans of the Frankfurt School make of today's America, and today's Europe? Would they still believe in the inevitability of Marxist revolution? We know the answer, because one of them is still around. Jürgen Habermas, the youngest of the Frankfurt School intellectuals, is 77, and still active. "His work," says Wikipedia, "sometimes labelled as Neo-Marxist, focuses on the foundations of social theory and epistemology; the analysis of advanced capitalist industrial society and of democracy; the rule of law in a critical social-evolutionary context; and contemporary – especially German – politics."As a student, I made a circle around Habermas. His work always seemed more grey, subtle, abstruse and meta than the great generation of Benjamin and Adorno; Habermas' thing is epistemology and hermeneutics -- in other words how we know what we know, who says so, and how we decide what's rational. He doesn't think revolution is inevitable; if it comes, it'll be based on people acting spontaneously in their own rational interests. Unfashionably (in a postmodernist and relativist era), Habermas believes that rationality can, to all intents and purposes, be underpinned by something we can think of as universal and objective -- an enlightened intersubjectivity, at the very least.
So far, so dull. But what of praxis? Well, recently Habermas has thrown himself behind the campaign of Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt for a United States of Europe. As reported in Sign and Sight, Habermas kicks away the idea that to let Europe drift without a constitution, or to have no army, is to be neutral. That, he believes, is to be spinelessly complicit:"If we are not able to hold a Europe-wide referendum before the next European elections in 2009 on the shape Europe should take, the future of the Union will be decided in favour of neo-liberal orthodoxy. Avoiding this touchy issue for the sake of a convenient peace and muddling along the well-trodden path of compromise will give free reign to the dynamic of unbridled market forces..."
The same goes for Europe's military effectiveness:
"Only a European Union capable of acting on the world stage - and taking its place beside the USA, China, India and Japan - can press for an alternative to the ruling Washington consensus in the world's economic institutions. Only such a Europe can advance the long overdue reforms within the UN which are both blocked by and dependent on the USA. It is precisely in critical cases of joint action that we must break free of our dependence on our superior partner. That is one more reason why the European Union needs its own armed forces. Until now Europeans have been subordinated to the dictates and regulations of the American high command in NATO deployments. The time has come for us to attain a position where even in a joint military deployment we still remain true to our own conceptions of human rights, the ban on torture and wartime criminal law."
In other words, we need to remilitarize in order not to be complicit with America's tendency to invade and to torture.
I find this interesting, especially when we take it into the Japanese context. If Habermas is "the real Neo-Marxism", we see him fundamentally reversing the positions of our friend David Marx on the misleadingly-titled Neomarxisme blog. Neomarxisme is pro-business and anti-militarist, whereas Habermas is anti-business and pro-militarist. In the Japanese context, perhaps Habermas would see the non-militarism of the Japanese constitution as America's way to ensure that their own militarism goes unchallenged. While it's certainly true that Japan's desire to re-militarize is being actively encouraged by the American regime, it's a strategy that could backfire for the Neocons if, for instance, Japan used its new clout to challenge imperialism and torture, and to demand a return to the norms of international law, the Geneva Convention, and so on (as Habermas suggests a Europe with a defense minister would do).
I'm also interested to see that the first act of "remilitarizing hawk" Shinzo Abe is a highly positive one: he's moving to set up a meeting with South Korea, in an attempt to do what Koizumi so signally failed to: mend relations with Japan's Asian neighbours. Imagine a United States of Asia and a United States of Europe, both with armies, and both demanding that the renegade US return to the framework of international agreements and the rule of law. Only the strong can keep the peace, and only the united can be strong.
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Date: 2006-09-29 08:44 pm (UTC)Perhaps you can clarify why Sharia family law courts would be a disaster in the UK, but aren't a disaster in Singapore, where the law is directly based on the British legal system.
"It's absolutely incompatible with the principle that laws are made by the whole population electing the lawmakers by universal suffrage."
Technically, so are Native American tribal courts -- except that the people of the United States have decided to allow it. The decisions actually made from such courts, however, are generally very similar in tone, if not the same.
"The reason ordinary people fought and died for the right to vote was because they were subject to laws but were powerless to change them."
I understand the strong emotional arguments against it, but on a practical level, giving people the choice of opting in to Sharia courts if both parties approve does nothing to strip others of their rights.
"I want British Muslims to partake fully in the political debates in the UK, stand for parliament, and argue within it. This requires them to frame arguments addressed to non-Muslims in terms which don't presuppose the existence of Allah..."
Very understandable indeed. However, Sharia family courts do not prevent this from happening, and may -- if implemented properly -- lead to more participation of Moslems in legal fields. In the U.S., you have to study a mix of both Western and Indian law to be a lawyer in Indian tribal courts, for example.
Obviously, the requirements for what constitutes certification for overseeing a Sharia family court are entirely the right of everyone in the UK to decide.
"Progressives have been engaged in a long battle to minimize the "lottery of life" effects of childhood; of how the parents' life horizons limit those of their children. Sharia Law would undo some of this."
I'd agree with you here. There are risks of this being the case, unless the law for the powers of Sharia Family Law courts were clarified to make sure existing policies were represented. Again, it's not that Sharia courts are universally bad, but that they can lead to injustices if their boundaries are not adequately defined.
"Jehovah's Witnesses have been stripped of the legal right to refuse blood transfusions . . . Would you be in favour of giving them back this right"
Frankly, I think some of the Blairite laws regarding families are a bit too invasive, although I agree with the goal. I'm not opposed to giving Jehovah's Witnesses the same rights to refuse transfusions that they have in the U.S., though I would want alternatives (http://www.gatago.com/sci/med/3445241.html) to be in place.
From my perspective, there are two ways that Sharia courts can come to pass in Britain.
1> A law is passed proactively that defines the courts and strictly defines their boundaries within the existing legal framework, in a way that it helps to diffuse tensions, while still promoting integration. Once passed, the law could serve as an example of how Sharia can coexist peacefully and progressively in a western society, and might help to inspire Muslims to seek a liberalization of laws elsewhere.
2> It takes place later, after a demographic shift, and more sweeping laws are forced through despite resistance, in a way that may tend to oppress others.
I would argue that example #2 is what most people are worried about, and what most politicians are arguing against, even if the issue at hand is example #1.