Critical Theory, Critical Pedagogy and the Permanent Crisis in Community Colleges

Transcending Marxism: The Problematics Of Social Class

Habermas and his intellectual forebears in the Frankfurt School are regularly accused of seeking solutions in abstract philosophical transcendentalism for problems that arise in concrete social relations. Arising out of the Hegelian/Marxist tradition but distressed by multiple twentieth-century atrocities and discomfited by a proletariat reluctant to fulfill its designated revolutionary role as an agent of change, the founders of “critical theory” lapsed into disappointment with the present and despair for the future. The European Enlightenment had failed to replace war with peace, tyranny with democracy, ignorance with knowledge, injustice with equity, disease with health and domination with liberty. What was to be done?

One of the most important themes with which updated types of Marx’s analysis had to deal was the uncertainty of Marx’s central concept of social class. Critical theorists observed the material gains made by working-class people under welfare capitalism and the dulling of their ideological edge as both wage-earners and the indigent sought and ultimately won some relief from their material worries. The legalization of trade unions and the collective bargaining process elevated the standard of living of workers while state-sponsored benefits such as unemployment insurance, social security and a “social safety net” assisted people unable to support themselves through their own labour. Apart from occasional displays of populist resentments, corporate capitalism was not genuinely threatened by proletarian insurrection. Rather, once-despised trade unions achieved improvements in wages and working conditions, but also provided employers with industrial discipline, labour peace and an expanding domestic market for goods and services. As Habermas (1984, p. 367) put it: “developments in the United States showed … the integrating powers of capitalism: without open repression, mass culture bound the consciousness of the broad masses to the imperatives of the status quo.”