Jürgen Habermas, philosopher of democratic socialism?

Habermas appeals to something that is of value, and it is the radically democratic idea, which he understands in a certain way; unfortunately like Hegel what he gives us is an ideology for the liberal wing of the professional class. (Zizekians would say his Hegel does not have a lack on, and so is, like the American Hegelians (followers of Wilfrid Sellars) Brandom, Pippin, and Pinkard, all too Kantian.) I think the Habermasian moment is past. Maybe in part this is the difference between socialism or social democracy and the "communist" idea or project as something else. 

Habermas thinks we are self-representing subjects (with a duty to “communicate”? to those who manage us?) not of desire, which has perhaps its own temporality, but need, which is a welfare state category. A need is either a 'real' desire or a 'legitimate' one, and so the concept joins that of 'rights', which are legal permissions, and these have reached such a high level of development today that some people even think it is progressive and of the moment to assert a veritable right to live (or 'breathe'), and while for those who want women to be obedient and reproduce while producing, their progeny have presumptive rights to live even before they have much existence, sense or sentience, etc., and animal and eco liberals, some of whom want to abolish certain religious rites dear to the West's other two main religions, those infamous corporeal marks of covenants with a liberating God or whatever; some of us people actually are polemically asserting the almost farcically novel right to not be murdered while they are in, say, hard to dissemble states of cultural or epidermic noir. Needs like rights are permissions granted by the state, and states right now, some in particular, are not enjoying the greatest popularity. I note that a prisoner may well have his right to be kept alive carefully guarded (including against himself, and such things as hunger strikes), but without any of the potentialities of self-expression and thought and learning that not all prisons allow, as the infamous camps of the 40s did not, and today's immigrant detention facilities tend not to. .....

Habermas may believe in a better state, and he is also is lucky enough to live in what perhaps is one, even under Angela Merkel, a thoughtful conservative who has nothing on Trump for apparent irrationality and other things. (The Germans are famously 'rational'). But appeals to such a state might not save us. And that is a problem, but it may also open up other possibilities, which might actually be happier, even if none of us know exactly what they would be like... 

What I would like to better understand among other things is why Martin Jay is still a Habermasian; I guess this comes out of a critique of the Kantian and Hegelian strains in Leninism that Adorno et al. were so suspicious of. I think in part it is a strategy to retrieve subjectivity as desire and affect for reason and management. Jay thinks otherwise we would have excess affect and that leans politics towards the fascism that he thinks Stalinism and therefore Lenin shared a page with. (An anti-fascist liberalism would be nothing new, and it might seem very German, since that country has had non-revolutionary left traditions for the most part, the fated Rosa Luxembourg and others notwithstanding. French and Italian philosophy today have revolutionary traditions, while Germany does not seem to). I am sure that, indeed it is easy to see, that such tendencies abound. But reason itself is an inadequate God, and accessing its own unconscious and thereby squaring the old circle of philosophy's exclusion of poetry, is a solution I rather doubt. I approach this from one angle in my oldest published paper, a short paper on Habermas's discursive ethics and its need to evoke 'poetic' uses of language for that Heideggerian basement affair which is 'world-disclosure'. Of course this self-deconstructs. Some Derrideans read my paper then (1991) and said, nice, but of course. Then again, Heideggerians including the Derrideans have no politics unless it is an anarchism accessed through an aesthetic ethics. And that is beautiful but… 

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Foucault think discourses are plural and essentially arbitrary and historically specific. There is no ‘transcendental’ or other grounding of them in some universal or meta-discourse that would enable philosophers not only to talk about everything but to do so by insisting that every other discourse be translated into its. His idea of philosophy follows a ‘restricted’ rather than ‘general economy’ in the sense that it enables adepts to speak in the true way. This places philosophy as occupying the space of truth so that it can be assured it is not in that of ideology and power; this is a Platonic conceit.

Habermas doesn't even think there are different discourses. There is a single discourse of rational collective self-management. That social model sustains his ideology of bureaucratic management. It is socialism for a society destined to be ruled by a university-educated class of professional workers over a non-university-educated class of non-professional workers (and everyone else, including the poor and unemployed as labor power).  In fact, that is what socialism was under Stalinism. It is republican, and minimally democratic, certainly not revolutionary in itself, though in its more liberal and democratic forms might be preferable to what we have, and certainly in some ways. It does bear some comparison with 19th century German “Revisionist” Marxism, that is, Marxism before Lenin and Luxembourg. Like the Soviet Union after Lenin, it is a socialism of the centralized state that is a successor to the French republican state that itself adapted monarchical absolutism. One difference from the current neoliberal regimes is that they are more driven by ideology and less by the peculiar forms of self-interest of capital proper.

Both Habermas and Terry Pinkard, in his interesting study of Hegel’s Phenomenology, think that some things that are important in forms of social life can be thematized though they usually are not. What can be thematized can be represented, and what is represented can be managed. Tell us what you want, need, or are thinking, say the bosses, so we can better tell you what to do to work well and be happy. Habermas was influenced by Heidegger, but like Gadamer his Heidegger is a bit too Cartesian/Kantian. The late Heidegger scholar Hubert Dreyfus and the school that consists of American students of his, think that there is an unthematizable character of social life and lifeworlds. Habermas doesn't; he believes that these are transparent in latency. One operator of this transparency is the concept of a norm or (in Wittgenstein's terms) rule, as distinct from something like a practice, which might well have a (visible or other sensible? or merely hypothetical?) form that is not that of a word or concept, and so not a principle.  

Bureaucracy is technology when it uses language. It treats language as representational, when in fact it is characteristically discrete in ways that the sensible and perceptible that it may refer to is not. Images have no elements, and gestures and postures and movements do not. (Painting, photography, and cinema do not have signifiers, only figures and other forms. Plato's 'eidos' perhaps divides in this way; forms are not ideas, or concepts.)

If philosophy has a utopia, it is surely communism, in the broader senses of that term, which resemble ‘anarchism’ more than socialism or social democracy. Indeed, if Heidegger has an implicit social utopia, it is clearly communism, as absence of capital and state, exploitation and domination, technology and bureaucracy. Needless to say, those who say all great ideas that people could genuinely care about are false, will betray you, will hurt you, for good intentions not only sometimes but always and only lead to evil, they are both saying “stop thinking and go back to work, you unruly, discontented, and disobedient slaves!” and making it clear that philosophy, or systematic thinking for its own sake and that of the thinker, not the boss, not the prince that the expert should counsel in return for his salary, must go the way of utopia, the time of the messiah, the world without systematically programmed injustice and malaise. Philosophy’s utopia is what it always was: the good life. It says this is something possible. Indeed, it says that if it can be thought, than it is possible, and in a sense exists for that reason.