Class Structure and Legitimatory Public Sphere: A Hypothesis on the Continued Existence of Class Relationships and the Problem of Legitimation in Transitional Societies

Abstract

In opposition to Habermas' critique of the depoliticization and gradual degeneration of established forms of the bourgeois public sphere in Western capitalist industrialized countries, right-wing conservatives and anti-communists often object that this is just as much the case in the societies of Eastern Europe. Indeed, they argue that there public discussion and parliamentary democratic decisionmaking procedures are a mere facade maintained over and above mechanisms of direct state censorship and control which are manipulated far more rigidly and undemocratically than over here. Despite the obvious apologetically pro-capitalist intention of this argument, it becomes clear that the allegations must be taken seriously when one realizes that the perversion of the forms of the bourgeois public sphere considerably limits the chances for the autonomous articulation of working class interests as well as for the formation of a genuine proletarian public sphere. In addition, especially in the Federal Republic, such arguments strike a response in the hard core of real experience of relevant population groups, linking the day to day consciousness of the masses to the appearances of reality in the countries and fixing at that point. This is an aspect of anti-communist propaganda which capital exploits systematically and demagogically, and to which its mass effectiveness can ultimately be attributed. Surely the worst way in which socialists can react to this type of argument is to simply deny and ignore the existence of such totalitarian manifestations in the countries of the socialist bloc. Precisely as socialists we must make these manifestations explicitly an issue. They must become the object of investigation and critique. Thus the following analytical outline proposes to develop a hypothesis, based on considerations derived from a theory of class, in order to sketch the connections that can be assumed to exist between the particular system of productive in these societies, and the particular structure of their relations of communications (Henrich).