Page 41 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

36 Jürgen Habermas

status: ‘we are starting’, they tell us, ‘from the assumption that the
concept proletarian is no less ambiguous than bourgeois. Nonetheless,
the former does refer to a strategic position that is substantively
enmeshed within the history of the emancipation of the working
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class.’ By contrast, ‘The bourgeois public sphere is not suffi ciently
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grounded in substantive life-interests.’ It discounts productive
activity as a legitimate contribution to the public sphere itself.
An ‘authentic’ proletarian public sphere, driven by emancipatory
impulses, must be rooted in the autonomous praxis of the working
classes: this, unlike Habermas’s public sphere, would connect with
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‘the real experiences of human beings’. For Negt and Kluge, ‘praxis’
is inclusive: it includes material and cultural production, as well as
political action. This inclusive model of participation in the public
sphere is a useful corrective to Habermas’s rather one-dimensional
concern with communication and public-opinion formation in
Structural Transformation. It reminds us that making an independent

film (one of Kluge’s own vocations) or setting up a local cooperative in
competition with a corporate behemoth can be both an existentially
and socially ‘meaningful’ intervention in the public sphere, every bit
as much as immersing oneself in political debate. (As we shall see,
Habermas’s later work is less fixated on ‘pure discourse’, favouring

the ideals of ‘communicative action’ which allows the possibility for
switching over to discourse whenever agreements or understandings
break down.)
At the same time, Habermas’s model remains a useful counterweight
to Negt and Kluge’s emphasis. In the late 1960s and early 1970s,
Habermas was at pains to counter what he saw as the arbitrary
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‘actionism’ of the Leftist student movement in West Germany.
It’s not hard to see how Negt and Kluge’s praxis model fl irts with
this danger. The term ‘proletariat’ was, even then, more ambiguous
than they cared to admit. The ‘working class’ was already becoming
an incoherent and disparate category, in the context of the rise of
‘managerialism’, an expanding white collar sector, highly unionised
blue collar sectors, diversifying subcultures, migrant workers and so
forth. A ‘call to praxis’, so to speak, devoid of any concern for how to
engage people who do not share in a particular vision or who might
be affected by someone else’s ‘praxis’ (the groups represented in the

independent film, or the employees of the corporate behemoth, say)
threatens to remain politically impotent at best and morally suspect
at worst. The problem of grassroots campaigners and direct action
groups that either won’t engage in dialogue with the public at large

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