Page 147 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

124 Communication and Evolution of Society

class structure appeared for the first time in a pure, namely, an
economic, form. Moreover, the model of the generation of crises
that threaten [a society's} existence can be developed in connec-
tion with the accumulation process because, with the capitalist
economic system, for the first time a system was differentiated that
had the specific function of dealing with the tasks of material
reproduction. Finally, the mechanism of legitimating domination
can be grasped in bourgeois ideologies because there, for the
first time, universalistic value systems incompatible with class
structures were made unreservedly explicit and were argumenta-
tively grounded. To this extent, the constitutive features of this
mode of production are also instructive for social formations in
earlier stages, but from this one cannot derive a demand that “the
logic of capital” be utilized as the key to the logic of social
evolution. For the way in which disturbances of the reproduction
process appear in capitalist economic systems cannot be general-
ized and transposed to other social formations. Moreover, we can-
not find in the logic of the rise of system problems the logic that
the social system will follow if it responds to such an evolutionary
challenge. If a socialist organization of society were the adequate
response to crisis-ridden developments in capitalist society, it
could not be deduced from any ‘determination of the form’”’ of
the reproductive process, but would have to be explained in terms
of processes of democratization; that is, in terms of the penetration
of universalistic structures into action domains, which—the pur-
posive-rationality of the choice of means notwithstanding—were
previously reserved to the private autonomous setting of ends.
As regards taking structuralist points of view into considera-
tion, I readily admit to having learned something from Marxists
like Godelier.** They have rethought the base-superstructure re-
lationship and conceptalized it in such a way that the proper
contribution of normative structures can be saved from a re-
ductionistic short-circuiting. To be sure, the concepts of objective
spirit and of culture developed in the Hegelian-Marxist tradition
from Lukacs to Adorno are not in need of this reformulation.
The stimulus that encouraged me to bring normative structures
into a developmental-logical problematic came from the genetzc
structuralism of Jean Piaget as well, thus from a conception that