Work and communicative competence

Interaction or communicative action, the other moment of conscious human activity, encompasses that domain of social institutions which is mediated by language and governed by social rules. The reduction of the category of communicative reflection to that of social labor - only too consistent with the proliferation of positivism in the twentieth century - also reappeared in the ‘economism’ of vast segments of the modern socialist movement. Habermas merely wants to refocus the issue that liberation of the trammeled senses can be most concretely conceptualized through the medium of verbal communication. In reinstating the category of interaction, Habermas refigures the major political priority for Marxists in the context of the refractive communication of late capitalism: a cultural offensive spearheading widespread involvement in the simultaneous process of demystification and the reconstruction of a popular will. Workers’ control has again come to the forefront of a renewed humanist Marxism and is central to the movement’s self-definition.