>I'm saying the speaking of language is a procedure undertaken (inevitably
>and definitively) within a complex of normative commitments. A commitment
>to democracy is a commitment to argument which is a commitment to making
>propositions and questioning them such that mutual understanding, and hence
>the possibility of agreement (as to what would be most 'right' there and
>then), might be reached on matters of mutual concern. So Habermas reckons
>you start (conceptually) with 'the lifeworld', in and through which norms
>assert themselves in terms of making certain questions germaine and making
>one argument 'righter' than another (didn't Marx say something about how we
>only ask and answer the questions any particular historical context
>allows/demands?). So Habermas's universalism is not, say, Bacon's
>universalism; it's much more modest than that. It's a claim he makes for
>the *procedure* through which generalisable interests (ie those we refer to
>as issues of justice) might be agreed upon such that coordinated action
>might enshrine the ensuing transformation. Language is the mode of
>*intersubjectivity* - not subjectivity - (and I suspect Habermas defines
>reason as intersubjectivity, too).
I agree that, when we speak, we act out (implicitly or explicitly) "a complex of normative commitments." Normative commitments, in a class society with racism, sexism, discrimination against the disabled, etc., however, are not generalizable.
First of all, questions of justice in a class society. Rousseau's heuristic in _Discourse on the Origin of Inequality_ still illuminates the nature of justice:
***** Do you not know that numbers of your fellow-creatures are starving, for want of what you have too much of? You ought to have had the express and universal consent of mankind, before appropriating more of the common subsistence than you needed for your own maintenance. Destitute of valid reasons to justify and sufficient strength to defend himself, able to crush individuals with ease, but easily crushed himself by a troop of bandits, one against all, and incapable, on account of mutual jealousy, of joining with his equals against numerous enemies united by the common hope of plunder, the rich man, thus urged by necessity, conceived at length the profoundest plan that ever entered the mind of man: this was to employ in his favor the forces of those who attacked him, to make allies of his adversaries, to inspire them with different maxims, and to give them other institutions as favorable to himself as the law of nature was unfavorable.
With this view, after having represented to his neighbors the horror of a situation which armed every man against the rest, and made their possessions as burdensome as their wants, and in which no safety could be expected either in riches or in poverty, he readily devised plausible arguments to make them close with his design. "Let us join," said he, "to guard the weak from oppression, to restrain the ambitious, and secure to every man the possession of what belongs to him: let us institute rules of justice and peace, to which all without exception may be obliged to conform; rules that may in some measure make amends for the caprices of fortune, by subjecting equally the powerful and the weak to the observance of reciprocal obligations. Let us, in a word, instead of turning our forces against ourselves, collect them in a supreme power which may govern us by wise laws, protect and defend all the members of the association, repulse their common enemies, and maintain eternal harmony among us."
Far fewer words to this purpose would have been enough to impose on men so barbarous and easily seduced; especially as they had too many disputes among themselves to do without arbitrators, and too much ambition and avarice to go long without masters. All ran headlong to their chains, in hopes of securing their liberty; for they had just wit enough to perceive the advantages of political institutions, without experience enough to enable them to foresee the dangers. The most capable of foreseeing the dangers were the very persons who expected to benefit by them; and even the most prudent judged it not inexpedient to sacrifice one part of their freedom to ensure the rest; as a wounded man has his arm cut off to save the rest of his body.
Such was, or may well have been, the origin of society and law, which bound new fetters on the poor, and gave new powers to the rich; which irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, eternally fixed the law of property and inequality, converted clever usurpation into unalterable right, and, for the advantage of a few ambitious individuals, subjected all mankind to perpetual labor, slavery and wretchedness. *****
A finer critic of justice in a class society than Rousseau does not exist among the Enlightenment philosophers; a sharper refutation of Plato's slander of Sophists in _The Republic_ (a tract against democracy) than Rousseau's is impossible.
Now, the problem with Rousseau is that, having realized the nature of justice in a class society, he couldn't draw a logical conclusion from his own reasoning (unlike Machiavelli and Marx). Rousseau ends up arguing for a possibility of reconciling particular wills through the formation of the general will, without at the same time arguing for the abolition of private property. In _The Social Contract_, he becomes a prophet of "the common good" against "factions," that is to say, against democratic associations, especially of the working class; what propels his argument below, therefore, is not unlike the reasoning behind an argument against "factions" in _The Federalist_:
***** ...[T]he general will alone can direct the State according to the object for which it was instituted, i.e., the common good: for if the clashing of particular interests made the establishment of societies necessary, the agreement of these very interests made it possible. The common element in these different interests is what forms the social tie; and, were there no point of agreement between them all, no society could exist....
...It follows from what has gone before that the general will is always right and tends to the public advantage; but it does not follow that the deliberations of the people are always equally correct. Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is; the people is never corrupted, but it is often deceived, and on such occasions only does it seem to will what is bad.
There is often a great deal of differences between the will of all and the general will; the latter considers only the common interest, while the former takes private interest into account, and is no more than a sum of particular wills: but take away from these same wills the pluses and minuses that cancel one another, and the general will remains as the sum of the differences.
If, when the people, being furnished with adequate information, held its deliberations, the citizens had no communication one with another, the grand total of the small differences would always give the general will, and the decision would always be good. But when factions arise, and partial associations are formed at the expense of the great association, the will of each of these associations becomes general in relation to its members, while it remains particular in relation to the State: it may then be said that there are no longer as many votes as there are men, but only as many as there are associations. The differences become less numerous and give a less general result. Lastly, when one of these associations is so great as to prevail over all the rest, the result is no longer a sum of small differences, but a single difference; in this case there is no longer a general will, and the opinion which prevails is purely particular. *****
Habermas's desire to create the general will through individual commitments to an ideal speech situation in the "lifeworld" of capitalism is the same futile and undemocratic attempt to condemn "factions" and "associations" (bourgeois euphemisms for class-based parties & social movements) that are cast as "particular" in relation to the State as the representative of the "general will," that is, "the sum of the differences" that remains after "the pluses and minuses that cancel one another" are taken out. In other words, Habermas's "ideal speech situation" and "lifeworld" are dialectical twins (individualism and organicism) that exist to obscure the primary & secondary contradictions of the bourgeois civil society: class, gender, race, and so on.
Further, justice based upon the rational deliberations of particular wills (abstracted from social relations), even if such deliberations aspired to conform to the "ideal speech situation," is still based upon "equal rights," and "equal rights" are negations of the "common interest" of humanity as conceived by Marx. Universalism based upon the ruling ideas of the bourgeois epoch ("equal rights," persuasion through "rational deliberation" in order to reach an "agreement," etc.) is the universalism of the present ruling class & abstract labor formed in the world market; "procedures of rational deliberations" that Habermas would like us to observe are none other than the procedures of commodity exchange, where formal equality inevitably (re)produces & legitimates real inequality.
Lastly, I do not argue against Habermas in order to say that there is no complex of normative commitments that communists should observe when we discuss what is to be done amongst ourselves. What such normative commitments might be, however, cannot be deduced from the heuristic of "an ideal speech situation." Normative commitments for communists must of necessity arise out of our practice, and, while they may be informed by normative commitments of the bourgeois civil society (in which all of us live), they are not to be held captive by the ruling ideas of our epoch which we seek to overcome.
Yoshie