Struggles for Social Welfare

Abstract

Without doubt Honneth’s attempt to reconnect morality and labour through the notion of struggles for recognition represents a major advance over Habermas’s consensus-driven model of communicative action. Nevertheless, by restricting morality to the ‘cultural’ sphere Honneth endorses Habermas’s uncoupling of the economy from the normative content of modernity. Thus, while Honneth is to be congratulated for replacing Marx’s subject-centred account of labour with an intersubjective account, he fails to acknowledge sufficiently the ‘moral’ content of workers’ ‘material’ struggles. To rectify this I propose to view workers’ struggles as attempts to retrieve the intersubjective domain lost beneath the system’s diremption of ‘ethical life’.