Habermas, democratic discourse, and class

IMHO, there is an implicit problem because politics in a modern society is only a sphere of public life, so there will always be something that stays out of it.
Recently I read a book about the political organisation of hunter gatherers (Hierarchy in the Forest), and apparently in these societies there usually is a chief but he has small power, and decisins are made mostly by social agreement; in this way, in some sense everything and nothing is politic in those societies, but this cannot scale to modern societies both because of size but also because we have to admit much more differentiated and individualistic behaviour (that according to the book is not generally accepted in those societies).

So in practice we are stuck with a public/private dichotomy that in some case cal leave “politics” hanging in the air.

Thanks for the “Emperor’s New Clothes” link, Google translated it quite handily. I’ve struggled with Habermas (his thinking or his writing?) before, but the impression I get from more informed critics of his work seems to explain somewhat my dissatisfaction and confusion: Habermas is talking about something other than politics as I understand it. I’ve have similar issues with Arendt.

Your links also led me on brief and enjoyable etymological search on “funk”. So thanks for that too.

Is there a transcript link for the Andruck clip, for easy translation?

When, for example, have you seen a newspaper op-ed written by a non-college educated person?

Every time a billionaire dropout buys a newspaper, among other times.

Didn’t Habermas spend the last 25 years, rather than asking how the abandonment came about, bewailing the tendencies of Germans (and other Europeans) to abandon political deference towards their betters?

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/29/opinion/29Habermas.html

“Many people will then complain in discourse, to be sure, but if this does not seem sufficient, they often vote with their feet and change their behavior – by turning to antidemocratic parties, by emigrating, by no longer seeing laws and regulations as bindings, etc.”

Might there be other ways in which people react to the perception of unfairness? I would think so, so why emphasize these particular ones?

“When, for example, have you seen a newspaper op-ed written by a non-college educated person? “

As PRW points out, the more relevant question is: when have you seen a newspaper op-ed that seriously clashed with the economic interests of the newspaper’s owners? Education matters a little, but it matters orders of magnitude less than wealth-power. It seems to me that while pretending to write about class, you clandestinely replace class with culture war categories like urban/rural and college/non-college. This framing is so pervasive in our media discourse, perhaps precisely because it flatters intellectual workers to overstate their own relevance (and Habermas’ theory is a prime example of this overestimation).

People working in journalism should better have appropriate training. It doesn’t have to be college, there are other ways, but it’s a different training than a truck driver needs. A point I would sign up to is the lack of diversity – in almost every respect, including class, SES, occupation, migration background – in the takshows. It’s the same people getting invited over and over, either pols or journos or thinktank people (usually “wirtschaftsnah” as they euphemize); they won’t often let a nurse or school teacher or engineer speak.

I think Habermas’ theory implicitly overvalues education and educated people insofar as education ought to be an advantage in a society in which power relationships are moderated by careful deliberation and reasoned discourse. The main problem in my view is that this premise is highly dubious: Highly educated people with well-founded views about how to solve society’s problems clearly do not wield much power in our society. Pretending they have too much power or “privilege” isn’t class politics, it’s simply wrong. Btw Germany at least isn’t as much affected by the ivy league elite brain virus which is so pervasive in US and some other countries; nobody cares or knows who went to what university.

Education matters a little, but it matters orders of magnitude less than wealth-power

This is a bit like saying sea water is less important (to the water cycle) than rain clouds are. The two things (credentials and wealth) have become convertible, like stocks and greenbacks. Jeffrey Epstein made a lot of money in this market

Despite the many faults of social media in its various forms, it has opened public space for a vastly greater number of people to contribute to public discourse. A lot of my relatives by marriage are rural and from a farming background. In the past, most would barely have picked up a pen after leaving school, but now they are on Facebook, sharing and commenting on memes about both cultural and political issues. As you might expect, their views are not usually close to mine, but some are open to discussion. And at least when I used to post on Facebook they were exposed to my ideas as well.

Engels: “Credentials and wealth have become convertible”
This is empirically false for the vast majority of college grads and I bet your own experience doesn’t support your claim.

John Q: Surely your relatives have always talked to pfriends, neighbors, colleagues about politics. We all do don’t we? Maybe we talk less than we used to before social media. We underestimate the importance and potency of person to person political discourse at our peril. I wonder what Habermas thought about this?

“TM” / or “Tm” ?
Should this be allowed (or what?) :-)

I have a few quibbles with this post, but the central thrust of it seems quite right to me. I had a similar reaction — it’s not just about talk! — when Habermas started seeping into my world in the late 70s.

Ironically, in this respect Habermas takes a step backward from his mentor Dewey, who was very clear in his understanding of the materiality of democratic participation and the need for its extension to the whole society. H puts flesh on the bones of D’s conception of discourse but decontextualizes it as well.

FWIW, in my view both of them are “convergists” when it comes to interests and values, that in a just society democratic discourse would bring us closer together, enhancing our we-ness. I think that stems from a pernicious assumption regularly made by leftists, and it helps explain why political parties play such a limited role in radical theory. (Whatever else is supposed to wither away, parties lead the pack.)

I bet your own experience doesn’t support your claim

I’m sitting on my gold toilet as I type this.

Thank you for your thoughful reflections, Lisa. Some random musing below:

I broadly agree that there are many voices which are underrepresented in public discourse and I would love to see more coverage of those who quietly make a positive contribution to society on a daily basis. This underrepresenation applies not only to those within our societies but also and even more strikingly to those from other, especically ‘non-Western’ countries. Most people in ‘the West’ are affected by a very strong conscious or unconcious bias which automatically excludes or diminishes the voices of ‘the Other’. When was the last time the victims of one of ‘our’ military adventures have been heard? They generally remain anonymous. But even within the West there is an implicit hierachy and parochialism assigning more importance to voices from the English-speaking world.

The problem with the media, seems to me not primarily the education level of the contributors or their elitism, but rather the populism they generally display when they ‘speak for the common man’ and a readership that laps this up because it plays to their prejudices. Appealing to the lower instincts of humanity is incredibly successful and allows the elite to pretend that their interests and that of the rest of the population are one and the same – generally at the expense of some out-group that needs to be vilified.

This dynamic is nothing new of course, but it is incredibly harmful to Democratic discourse. It has recently been amplified to the nth degree by the rage-bait algorithms of social media and, call me elitist, but I am not sure that the broadening of participation has been an altogether postitive development. Back in the day, some of these cranks would rant in a bar or write letters to the local paper – now they might have thousands or millions of followers to whom they feed hate-speech.

engels: “TM, everything you’re saying about “most graduates” not being rich and powerful could be said of “most” anything (except the rich and powerful 0.1% themselves); men, white people, “professionals”, property/business owners, even journalists, politicians and CEOs.”

Isn’t that interesting? But what follows from it?

Although, listing CEOs and politicians is a bit odd because they do by definition have power. Business owners own means of production and have power over their employees. That is what defines them as a class. I really don’t know what we are even doing here.

Education “an important part of the causal story of why many rich people are rich and why many privileged people are privileged”

Unsubstantiated claim, no evidence provided, empirically highly doubtful.

@engels and TM

Here is a comparison across OECD countries of the income premium of tertiary education (first table):
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/education-at-a-glance-2025_1c0d9c79-en/full-report/what-are-the-earnings-advantages-to-education_7a7e64e0.html

Italy, where I live, is the one with the lowest premium, which is weird because Italy has a low percentage of people with tertiary education (this explains why we have a “brain drain” problem). The USA has a really large premium (the higest for rich countries), the UK is closer to the OECD average (from below), Switzerland has a slighlty lower one than the UK, Germany is above the OECD average.

I will note that the sort of populist rethoric that we associate with the authoritarian right wing, and that is often associated to disgruntled male blue collars, is certainly alive and well here in Italy since the ’90s (see the Lega party), so I think the problem is more “cultural” (they feel devalused) than strictly economic (in my experience, often the blue collars I know don’t realize that their wages are the same or higer than many white collars).
But my experience is in Italy that is a bit of an outlier.

Isn’t that interesting? But what follows from it?

Saying graduates or urbanites are privileged is true for roughly the same reasons (ie. mainly statistical averages of various desirable outcomes) that saying men or white people are (ie. it’s sort of half-true). But one of these opinions is part of the liberal catechism and the other is liberal heresy (and vice-versa for populism).

To be 100% clear I’m not oblivious to any of it (although strictly speaking “races” don’t exist and genders are oppressive social constructs) I just think it’s all remarkably similar in structure to the urban/rural and graduate/blue collar divisions (ie. status categories in Weber’s sense).

Class otoh (aka relationship to the means of production/control of capital) remains the fundamental social contradiction and source of power and oppression. Hence the ‘nym.

Sorry if I wasn’t clear!

Re the engels/TM/et al. debate (or “debate”):

In 1972 or thereabouts, the late Christopher Jencks and a number of co-authors published Inequality, which drew on empirical evidence (mostly or entirely from the U.S., if I recall correctly) to argue that the links (correlations) between economic inequality, educational inequality, and “cognitive” inequality were quite weak. In the years that followed, Jencks changed his position somewhat, I believe, as it became clear that educational credentials did, on average, increase lifetime earnings, though the size of the “premium” varies from place to place, per the comment by MisterMr.

I’ve italicized the phrase “on average” to make clear that there are many individual cases where credentials don’t carry a premium. Everyone’s particular story and trajectory is different, of course. Also, in the U.S. at any rate, there are some blue-collar occupations that pay fairly (or very) well, e.g., the skilled trades (plumber, electrician, auto mechanic, certain skilled factory jobs, etc.). Some ‘small’ entrepreneurs or small business owners (the petit bourgeois, in Marxian terms) also do well economically. Moreover, the premium to a 4-year degree in the U.S., unless it’s in certain fields, has been declining at least in the past decade or so, I think, though I don’t have a citation at hand.

In short and unsurprisingly, it’s complicated. There are different kinds of privilege, and different definitions and dimensions of class, and for those reasons, among others, this whole issue is unlikely to get too clarified, never mind resolved, in a comment thread.

I’m not oblivious to any of it: actually I feel I’m being constantly bombarded by it, from libs and nats, as are we all. I’m just bemused as to why the TMs ot this world are as hostile to identity politics when it’s based on accent and tool-wielding as they are enthusiastic about it when it’s based on skin tone and dress-wearing (and ofc I think control of capital is important, I just don’t think it alone makes you rich and powerful, with all due respect to my Uber driver).

But it’s good to have more people on the class struggle side, even if it’s in such an erratic and inconsistent way.

you literally claimed that all college graduates are rich

No, I didn’t.

TM There is a pretty obvious motte and bailey argument going on here (both you and MisterMr). When I point out that most college grads are neither rich nor powerful or influential, that most of them are actually just ordinary workers, many under quite precarious conditions, you come up with an argument about average incomes.

? I’m actually agreeing with you, at least WRT Italy where the difference in average incomes is very low, but likely also in other places.
I did say that the blue collar/white collar divide is more a cultural issue in my comment at 32.

I would say that blue collar perceive increasing economic insecurity, but wrongly blame it on white collars for cultural issues.
Also wrongly blame it on immigrants for cultural issues, BTW.

The difference in income exists (more in some places than in others) but isn’t really caused by liberal policies, so e.g. voting Trump or similar politicians is not going to help blue collars.
Also, suppose that in Italy the small income difference is due to some secret sauce policy (I don’t know what one), here too blue collars believe that they have been screwed by liberals, so there is something that doesn’t click.

It is perhaps also worth noting that class (alongside race, gender, and sexuality) can be understood as a socially constituted relation structured by institutions and norms, while domains (such as education, law, media, etc.) function as institutional sites through which these relations are reproduced and mediated. From that perspective, these categories appear less like a single hierarchy and more like interacting dimensions of social organization.

Who’d a thunk it.

Fwiw I sort of agree with LFC, MrMr and Matt too (but not my intersectional nemesis ETB).

It will be fun to revisit all this when AI has wiped out the remaining returns to education (not mention made it impossible to educate anyone…)

Oh I disagree that the declining conditions of blue-collar workers aren’t caused by liberal policies though or that voting for the right can’t help them (eg. yes, Virginia, restricting immigration can increase wages in occupations where the supply of labour has been reduced).

It’s odd to see a self-declared Marxist argue in favour of class fragmentation! Improving outcomes for one subset of workers through exclusionary policy is not equivalent to improving outcomes for the working class as a whole. While immigration restrictions can raise wages in narrowly defined labour markets under certain conditions, durable improvements in worker welfare are more strongly associated with increased bargaining power, stronger institutional protections (such as unions and labour law), and coordinated worker organization.

Personally, I’d rather see policies that strengthen the system-wide, long-term bargaining power of workers as a class, rather than deliver targeted, short-term gains for some workers – though that perspective may be shaped by a more straightforward commitment to class solidarity than identity-based framing allows.

durable improvements in worker welfare are more strongly associated with increased bargaining power, stronger institutional protections (such as unions and labour law), and coordinated worker organization.

All of which have been eviscersted by liberal policy over the past half-century (which was the point I was making, rather than the various straw men preceding this).

engels 14: “The two things (credentials and wealth) have become convertible, like stocks and greenbacks”

Now claiming at 43 that this doesn’t mean what it literally says. No, people don’t become wealthy by selling educational credentials. It’s a nonsensical metaphor. There are too many highly educated, highly credentialed people that are not remotely wealthy for that to be true. Very few people become rich because of their education. There is a little more truth in the converse: wealthy people often covet educational credentials for their own children. Especially in societies obsessed with elite education, they often invest substantial amounts to get them ionto the right institutions. It is well known that this a mechanism of elite reproduction. But this applies mainly to a small slice of the eduction system. If you want to talk about elite education specifically, you need to distinguish that from the vast majority.

Higher education was a privilege of the upper class a long time ago. In the meantime, access has vastly expanded. Nowadays in wealthy countries, one third to half and more of an age cohort go to college/university. They are part of, not apart from the “working class”.

I find the “education as economic class” narrative especially irksome in a time when the actual capitalist class has decided that, contrary to the postwar period, they don’t care about an educated labor force any more, and are denigrating education and the educated and dismantling the educational system. The left really doesn’t need to feed into this reactionary, anti-intellectualist discourse.

Engels, you want to divide the working class on all three dimensions (race, gender, education), and then claim that the true working class = white, male, no university. I just saw (former royal correspondent) Camilla Tominey pushing the same classification in the Telegraph, complaining about the wokeness of the Church of England. If there’s a distinction between your position and hers, I’m not seeing it.

Nowadays in wealthy countries, one third to half and more of an age cohort go to college/university. They are part of, not apart from the “working class”.

Do you know what percentage of Western countries are white or male? (Can you guess what price Enron shares ended up trading at?)

Engels, you want to divide the working class on all three dimensions (race, gender, education), and then claim that the true working class = white, male, no university.

No I don’t, and I will guarantee that nothing I have ever written bears that interpretation (except to someone already fixated on it). Because I am not a fascist, a racist or a Trump supporter.

Tl;dr me (final reprise): class is a relationship to the means of production and the working class is everyone alienated from them. Other stuff (“race”, sex/gender, religion, class origin/trajectory, education, disability, age, geographical location, … basically status categories) is all important to an extent (and to different extents in different times and places) but not fundamentally how capitalism functions and oppresses people.

What I object to is people cherry-picking among the “other stuff” based on their own class interests/experiences/(liberal) party-political agendas/what seems salient in the US/on the TV/in pay-walled journals no one reads/in possibly a few other Anglosphere settler colonial crime scenes, and then spewing Student Grant gibberish about “ontology” and “mediation” to try to obscure the arbitrariness of that and how it owes far more to bourgeois sociology and American liberalism than Marx or any socialist or working class politics worthy of the name.

it is amusing that someone… is so eager to misrepresent what other people have said

If you think I’m deliberately lying then maybe it’s not worth debating me? I promise I won’t be offended if you don’t.

Setting aside the schadenfreude of watching the self-appointed arbiter of true Scotsman socialism throw a tantrum at the mildest pushback against their class particularism, there is something almost gratifying in their latest contribution reverting to their familiar, reflexive “everyone who disagrees with me is a Harvard-educated US neoliberal elite argle-bargle.” Is there value to picking apart the motte-and-bailey between the class primacy they purport to promulgate and the class reductionism they actually do, or how the use of “fundamentally” is being used to prop up a position that is more economism than Engels, or even the dismissive handwave of many decades of socialist theory (including pretty much all of heterodox Marxism) with argument-free sneering contempt? Probably not (you can lead a mind to Gramsci, but you can’t make them think).

Flattering though the title of nemesis may be, it is not reciprocated (I regret to report that some of us have more pressing concerns than the occasional snarky internet comment). As it happens, I am not particularly concerned by their little war of ideological purity (damaging in real movements though it may be, it is largely harmless in one single terminally online gatekeeper), nor do I even necessarily object to the almost reflexive reactionary opposition to emancipation of subaltern working classes (which, at least, stops short of outright declaring alienated proletarians mere symptoms of bourgeois decadence), I merely find it slightly tiresome to see the consistent hijacking of potentially interesting discussions enacted by someone relying on a loose grab-bag of ideas from better thinkers, mangled and redeployed to prosecute personal grievances against other commenters rather than engage in anything resembling dialectical materialism. Ah well, such is life (and back to the grindstone for me). Still, at least some amusement may be derived from the irony of a follower of someone who argued that ‘the point is to change the world, not merely to describe it’ seem so doggedly committed to doing neither.

I mean what does this kind of generalisation boil down to: a disabled homeless gay man on death row in Zimbabwe is still privileged versus Alice Walton because he can, if he wishes, watch a movie that fails the Bechtel test?

@engels

One difference between e.g. race and gender and educational attainment is that people do not choose to be born white or male, but do (to a certain degree) choose if they gewt a degree or not.
There are are differences here because people from disadvantaged backgrounds might have more problems getting said degrees, but here generally “liberals” push for most people having more access to education, that would be illogical if the liberal left only acted to the advantage of those who already have education (whose interest should ideally be to keep out the others).

Most of the status/ideological opposition of blue collars IMHO comes from the perception of either loss of status (that maybe a consequence of economical factors but has strong cultural/psychological effects) or from the idea that “liberals” act against the interest of blue collars (or of males or of whites), but the question is exactly what are the “liberals” doing against the interest of blue collars.
It seems to me that there is a large degree of wishful thinking in right leaning blue collars, who believe that they would naturally have a much better position and only are down because the libs are meddling, whereas the problem is that maybe the libs aren’t protecting them enough, but the others (Reagan but also Trump and similar) are even worse on the protection thingie.

Which leads to the main psychological problem: there are a lot of reason blue collars are in a bad position, but acknowledging these would hurt the self perception of many of them, so they go to snake oil salesmen instead (like Trump).

So in this case it is IMHO very important to distinguish between the actual class interest and the psychological/social status issues.

@J-D 53 and ETB in general)
Perhaps I overreacted because I’m reading Butler’s “Gender troubles” which due to Lacanian influences stretches this too much, but:
There is a strand of leftish tought, that we could call critical theory or french structuralism or similar, that is very interested in the effects of ideology.
Following this perspective, first one assume that there are cultural structures, these are then embodied/reproduced by discourse/institutions, and this has an effect on the life of people.
This point of view has some merits in many situations, however if you take it to the excess it seems that there is some spooky cultural ghost that causes all the evils in the world.
So I wanted to stress that there are deep economic structure reasons (that is the opposite of “structuralism” which deals with cultural structures) that influence stuff, but our perception of these economic structures is (A) an abstraction so in itself still a discourse and (B) often clouded by culòtural structures, and that the two levels should be considered separated.

Pedantic point: ETB @65 implies that Engels had a significant hand in the Theses on Feuerbach (the famous thesis no. 11 being “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”).

The text, however, was written by Marx in 1845; according to marxists.org, Engels published an edited version as an appendix to his 1888 book Ludwig Feuerbach
and gave it the title “Theses on Feuerbach,” but it’s Marx’s work, not Engels’, nor a joint (co-authored) work.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/

One difference between e.g. race and gender and educational attainment is that people do not choose to be born white or male, but do (to a certain degree) choose if they gewt a degree or not.

Yes! That’s why liberal idpol dovetails with a moralistic outlook that seeks to blame individuals for their “life choices”.

the question is exactly what are the “liberals” doing against the interest of blue collars

https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=neoliberalism

(Albeit you seem to have missed the memo that being male or female isn’t about what you were born but how you define.)

LFC @ 70

Respectfully, I’m not sure how that follows from my comment? In any case, just to clarify, no such implication was intended (the quote from the Theses on Feuerbach is, of course, by Karl Marx).

Having glanced at some more of the collection of letters and numbers “comments,” it’s interesting to see the same patterns repeat:

One extreme counterexample is used to try to invalidate a structural argument (by this logic, the existence of a wealthy worker and a poor capitalist would refute class analysis).

Then there’s the claim that the Middle East is an “experiment in identity politics” (as if material conditions, institutions, and geopolitics don’t matter); by the same “logic” one could describe “class politics taking hold of the state” with outcomes like Soviet famines or the Cambodian genocide.

And then we’re back to “everything is liberalism part 2: electric boogaloo” – I wouldn’t expect a class reductionist to agree with theorists like Hartmann, but at this point it’s fair to wonder whether any engagement with that line of thought is taking place at all…

I wrote: “Not long ago, a historical blink of an eye of a few generations ago, husbands had literal guardianship over their wives and unmarried daughters, could decide their education, career, even whether they could leave the house, whether they could have a bank account, not to mention they had no political or economic rights.”

engels calls this bullshit

Can you not see the specific claim I quoted (it wasn’t that?)

“all I said is”

You argued that right-wing policies can help blue-collar workers through mechanisms such as restricting immigration. Yet even if such policies can raise wages in certain occupations, they also have broader effects on labour market structure and class power – and so it doesn’t follow that they help workers as a whole; at most, they benefit some segments of workers while likely weakening overall worker bargaining power.

The disagreement isn’t about whether wages can rise in specific cases, but about whether those gains count as ‘helping workers’ when they come at the expense of broader class cohesion and bargaining power. I would say they don’t, but it seems we differ on that point.

provoked this little firestorm of liberal sanctimony, mudslinging and “Theory”

Setting aside the attribution of all disagreement to ‘liberalism’ and the attempted dismissal of anything other than class reductionist Marxism with but a quotation mark, there is a deep irony to the accusation of ‘mudslinging’. Look, you can either engage at the level of structural and systemic analysis, or you can reduce everything to rhetorical labels and invective – but the two approaches aren’t really compatible…

generally “liberals” push for most people having more access to education

Lol
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/jobs/schools-universities/graduates-repay-128000-labour-tuition-fee-increase/

Ok, ETB, you win. I don’t have the energy to keep clarifying that I didn’t say the things you are pretending I said and then going off on turgid lectures about any longer; and your weird personal obsessiveness is finally getting to me.

You know what’s best for the working class (academic left-liberalism) and I’m sure they’ll start voting for it any day now.

That’s a fairly loaded way to bow out. I don’t think I’ve misrepresented you, and could just as easily say the same in reverse – but there’s little point in re-litigating that, and I’m happy to let our exchange stand.

For one thing, it is improbable in the extreme that restrictions on immigration benefit those blue-collar workers who are prevented from migrating by them.

Exactly.

And once workers are divided into those who are included and those who are excluded, such categories tend to become remarkably fluid – and rarely to the advantage of workers themselves…

@engels 72

So this is a famous book about “neoliberalism”, and there are four faces on the cover, Reagan, Deng Xiaoping, Pinochet, Tatcher.

They are (arguably for Deng) all right leaners, so we should differentiate between right-neoliberalism (Tatcher, Reagan) and left-neoliberalism (Blair, Clinton, various present center left leaders).

The shift to neoliberalism as a whole was not something done specifically by the left, it was done by a large part by the right too, and in some cases (I’m thinking mostly to Reagan, but also some italian examples) they were the beginning of modern day right-wing populism (in some sense Trump is Reagan on steroids).

You basically say that the (liberal) left abandoned blue collar workers due to idpol, but I’m not that sure that this is how things went: perhaps the populist right snatched these workers through idpol first (see Reagan and the Lega in Italy), perhaps these workers weren’t all that marxist to begin with (but looked so because at the time the left had the correct idpol).

Based on my personal experience, I think all three things happened, and the left should seriously become more socialist, but also a large part of it comes both from the populist right identity work AND from the private convictions of many blue collar workers, who often don’t align neither with liberals but also with marxism/socialism (i.e. they want to rise their station inside the system not so much to change the system).