> People, you can't criticize ideology without a normative foundation.
Sure you can. Capitalism is beyond morality; it's not good or evil in that sense, and every morality, if you push it to its limit, turns into very concrete class interests, of who gets what. Habermas' notion of rationality is a polite synonym for the EC's social democratic public sphere -- which, as we know, has been absorbed into the mitochondria of the EU; what should be a diagnosis of (tele)communicatory capital, who owns it, who accumulates it, and who doesn't, ends up as just another neo-national morality play. It's to Habermas' credit that he wants to hold on to the utopia of a progressive neo-nationalism; he's certainly not a conservative or neolib. But that neo-nationalism is sharply limited to the very specific confines of the Bundesrepublik and the political situation of the 1970s and early 1980s; the Underground Euro-express to Genoa, where the comrades put up the most magnificent and awe-inspiring show of resistance to Eurocapital yet, only books reservations on the Bourdieu Mag-Lev theory-shuttle.
Have we broken the thread-record yet?
-- Dennis