/lit/ - Literature

>>22404239
>Habermas does a superficial analysis of the relationship between technology and politics. He is content with arguments like: "the orientation of technological progress depends on public investments," hence on politics. He seems to be totally unaware of dozens of studies (including Galbraith's or mine) showing the subordination of political decisions to technological imperatives. He winds up with the elementary wish to "get hold of technology again" and "place it under the control of public opinion . . . reintegrate it within the consensus of the citizens.” The matter is, alas, a wee bit more complicated; likewise, when he contrasts the technocratic schema with the decision-making schema. To grasp the interaction, he ought to study L. Sfez (Critique de la décision, 1974). And Habermas's discussion of the "pragmatic model" is along the lines of a pious hope, a wish: the process of scientification of politics, such as appears desirable to him, is a "must.” But the reality of this technicization of politics actually occurs on a different model! Habermas poses the philosophical problem honesty: The true problem is to know if, having reached a certain level of knowledge capable of bringing certain consequences, one is content to put that knowledge at the disposal of men involved in technological manipulations, or whether one wants men communicating among themselves to retake possession of that knowledge in their very language. But Habermas poses the problem outside of any reality. When reading this text, we need only ask: Who is that "one" who puts technology at the disposal of either group? Who exercises this (if you like) supreme “will”?

>>21636970
>And of course Karl Marx put the final touches on the edifice by providing the theoretical justification for what was as yet only emotion, impulse, need. Marx is truly a bourgeois thinker when he explains all of history by work, when he formulates man's whole relation to the world in terms of work, when he evaluates all thought in terms of its relation to work, and when he gives work as the creative source of value. Although he did not believe in values, he implies that work is a virtue when he condemns the classes that do not work. He was one of the most articulate interpreters of the bourgeois myth of work, and because he was a socialist and a defender of the working class, he was one of the most active agents in spreading the myth to this class. Besides, it was through work that this class would one day win power and freedom. For the post-Marxian working class, therefore, work meant both the explanation of its condition and the certainty of seeing it end. Once the motive of doctrine had been added to the motive of necessity, how could the workers fail to be imbued with this ideology? It was the bourgeois who invented the dogma of the eminent dignity of the worker, but it was Karl Marx who led the proletariat to this thenceforth ineradicable conviction. From then on, the myth of work became a myth of the left, and the bourgeois and the worker were united in the same commonplace: work is the be-all and end-all of life. The only difference is that for the bourgeois, work tends more and more to be the work of other people, while for the worker only he himself can bear the noble title of worker. Anyone who does not belong to the proletariat, being a nonworker, is a parasite.

>>21437404
>A global, all-absorbing society tending to be so structured that all its parts are highly co-ordinate, each one reinforcing yet dependent on the others, cannot be divided. Marx recognized that fact, but as his society had not yet become global, a good many of his observations on the subject were purely philosophic conjectures. Philosophy always has tended to totalize in its search for an intellectual system, a master key to universal reality. Today the same tendency prevails, not in the intellectual sphere (which, on the contrary, is almost hopelessly fragmented), but in the sphere of reality, all parts of the social body being so conjoined and interconnected as to make that organism all-encompassing and uniform. I do not share Lefebvre’s view of current society as a cluster of practically incoherent subsystems, studded with chinks and gaps, destined to falter and come to a halt. The system, on the contrary, continues to assert and to consolidate itself. The subdivisions operate as one, forming a network of interrelations. The globality is not artificial, forced, or haphazard; it is a systematic development that gradually has absorbed all the social components.

>>21234006
>And of course Karl Marx put the final touches on the edifice by providing the theoretical justification for what was as yet only emotion, impulse, need. Marx is truly a bourgeois thinker when he explains all of history by work, when he formulates man's whole relation to the world in terms of work, when he evaluates all thought in terms of its relation to work, and when he gives work as the creative source of value. Although he did not believe in values, he implies that work is a virtue when he condemns the classes that do not work. He was one of the most articulate interpreters of the bourgeois myth of work, and because he was a socialist and a defender of the working class, he was one of the most active agents in spreading the myth to this class. Besides, it was through work that this class would one day win power and freedom. For the post-Marxian working class, therefore, work meant both the explanation of its condition and the certainty of seeing it end. Once the motive of doctrine had been added to the motive of necessity, how could the workers fail to be imbued with this ideology? It was the bourgeois who invented the dogma of the eminent dignity of the worker, but it was Karl Marx who led the proletariat to this thenceforth ineradicable conviction. From then on, the myth of work became a myth of the left, and the bourgeois and the worker were united in the same commonplace: work is the be-all and end-all of life. The only difference is that for the bourgeois, work tends more and more to be the work of other people, while for the worker only he himself can bear the noble title of worker. Anyone who does not belong to the proletariat, being a nonworker, is a parasite.