Page 151 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

128 Communication and Evolution of Society

ized decisions of strategically acting private subjects; whereas the
state guarantees the presuppositions for the continued existence
of an economy differentiated from its domain of sovereignty, and
thereby excludes itself from the process of production, while at
the same time—as a state based on taxation—making itself de-
pendent on it.#4 According to the other version, the principle of
organization consists in the relationship between capital and wage
labor; the state however (somewhat ex machina) has to function
as the agent for establishing this principle in an initially alien
environment. In the one case, the depoliticization of a process of
production that is 7m fact controlled through markets is constitu-
tive for the mode of production; in the other case, it is the sate-
enforced expansion of an interaction network that is formally
regulated through exchange relations that is constitutive.
Another example that can elucidate the systematic importance
of historical materialism is the question of classifying bureau-
cratic-socialist societies. Here I cannot even run through the most
important interpretations that have been offered for this am-
biguous complex. Instead I shall indicate a perspective from
which the different interpretations can be roughly classified. In
one version, societies of the bureaucratic-socialist type have, in
comparison to developed capitalist societies, reached a higher stage
of evolution. In the other version, it is a question of two variants
of the same stage of development—that is, different historical
expressions of the same principle of organization. The second
version is represented not only in the trivial form of (largely
invalidated) convergence theses but also by theoreticians who—
Adorno, for instance—by no means play down the system-specific
differences in the mode of production but yet (with Max Weber)
attribute a weight of its own to the autonomization of instrumen-
tal rationality.*? If this version could be corroborated, the com-
plementary relationship of state and economy that is characteristic
of modern societies would have to be grasped quite abstractly;
for then the relation of the state based on taxation to the
capitalist economy, which is constitutive for bourgeois society,
would represent only one of its possible realizations. On this pre-
supposition critical developments do not automatically have to
count as indicators for the exhaustion of structurally limited