Borman, David. Labour, Exchange and Recognition - Marx Contra Honneth

Philosophy & Social Criticism
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Labour, exchange and recognition: Marx contra Honneth

David A. Borman
Philosophy Social Criticism 2009 35: 935
DOI: 10.1177/0191453709340637
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David A. Borman
Labour, exchange and

recognition: Marx contra
Honneth
Abstract This article explores Marx’s contention that the achievement of

full personhood and, not just consequently, but simultaneously, of genuine
intersubjectivity depends upon the attainment of recognition for one’s place
in the social division of labour, recognition which is systematically denied to
some individuals and groups of individuals through the capitalist organiza-
tion of production and exchange. This reading is then employed in a critique
of Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition which, it is argued, cannot account
for the systematic obstacles faced by some struggles for recognition.
Key words exchange · Jürgen Habermas · Axel Honneth · labour ·
lifeworld · Karl Marx · recognition · system · E. P. Thompson
Every Hegel must have his Marx. The basic claim advanced in this paper
is that Axel Honneth is a Hegelian whose efforts at reviving the Hegelian
theme of recognition in the context of a social philosophy stripped of
the metaphysical baggage with which Hegel himself was burdened are
worthwhile, provocative – and one-sided. In fact, the entire debate
surrounding what Charles Taylor famously called the ‘politics of recog-
nition’ threatens to remain one-sided in this way so long as no similar
effort is made to bring Marx to the table. This, then, is my purpose in
this article: to play Marx – inadequately, to be sure – to Honneth’s Hegel.
It is not, however, as one might think, Marx’s appropriation of the
master–slave dialectic in the analysis of class struggle that I will argue
complements and qualifies contemporary recognition theory. That analy-
sis is indeed indicative of an interest on Marx’s part in the recognition
problematic and, until classes exist no more, it suggests an obvious
way in which his work remains relevant. Yet that unfashionable topic
PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM • vol 35 no 8 • pp. 935–959

PSC
Copyright © The Author(s), 2009.
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http://psc.sagepub.com DOI: 10.1177/0191453709340637

936
Philosophy & Social Criticism 35 (8)
is not the relevance I wish to explore, though not from considerations
of fashion; rather, I intend to argue for the importance of taking
cognizance of Marx’s insight that the achievement of full personhood and,
not just consequently, but simultaneously, of genuine intersubjectivity
depends upon the attainment of recognition for one’s place in the social
division of labour. The urgency of this claim stems from Marx’s conten-
tion, both early and late, that capitalism systematically thwarts such
recognition through its organization of both production and exchange.
My first concern in what follows is to explain as well as to defend
this position in Marx; but it will also be necessary in this connection to
discuss Honneth’s (mis)reading of Marx and consequent rejection of his
insights (section I). This is, in part, why Honneth’s theory is particularly
inviting as a target among liberal(/communitarian) Hegelians; since unlike
Taylor, for instance, he has not merely ignored Marx but has considered
and dismissed him. In a less direct fashion his debate with Nancy Fraser
(recorded in the volume entitled Redistribution or Recognition?) also
offers clues regarding his thinking on the general relationship between
recognition and the systematic economic obstacles to human fulfilment
with which Marx was predominantly concerned. I will conclude by
offering a critique of Honneth from Marx’s perspective aimed at showing,
among other things, that because of the way Honneth constructs the
categories with which he analyses struggles for recognition, his Hegelian
theory is in fact resistant to the required Marxian supplementation at a
very basic level (section II).
I Capitalism and recognition
According to Marx, the emergence of modern civil society in the over-

coming of feudalism leaves human beings living a kind of double life,
half in the political world of community and half in the private world
of commerce (and, at least nominally, of conscience). This bifurcation of
social life sets loose the forces of production that had been constrained
by the mores of a total social order, in which honour rather than profit
was the organizing principle. As a result, it is not long before the expan-
sion of those forces begins to crowd out or trivialize developments in
the social world of community. The three volumes of Capital tell the
story of what happens to human beings once modern, capitalist civil
society gets under way. It begins with the base unit of capitalism, the
commodity; but it also begins, like Aristotle and Hegel and unlike social
contractarians, with an understanding of human beings as inherently
social. Commodities are first defined in accordance with their use-value,
their correlation to human needs – that is, they are tied from the begin-
ning to the context of social exchange and the mutual dependence of

937
Borman: Labour, exchange and recognition
individuals living in society. While use-values themselves are ordered
according to a hierarchy of needs and not according to the amount of
labour required to satisfy them, the diversity of use-values as a whole
introduces the need for a standard unit of measurement, a unit of
exchange-value, which quantity of labour supplies.1 The exchange-value,
therefore, embodies an abstraction from the use-value of the commod-
ity in question, which is to say, an abstraction from its correlation to
human needs and from the particular nature and skill of the labour that
produced it. All that remains is the commodity as the embodiment of
abstract labour in some determinate quantity.2
The totality of heterogeneous use-values or physical commodities reflects

a totality of similarly heterogeneous forms of useful labour, which differ in
order, genus, species and variety: in short, a social division of labour. This
division of labour is a necessary condition for commodity production,
although the converse does not hold; commodity production is not a neces-
sary condition for the social division of labour. . . . Only the products of
mutually independent acts of labour performed in isolation, can confront
each other as commodities.3
Marx notes that exchange-relations that begin as relatively periph-

eral to production must become sufficiently widespread such that they
can be taken into account in the process of production itself before a
social division of labour of the relevant sort attains. That is, I must
produce surplus of a specialized product with the aim of exchanging it
in order to satisfy my diverse needs. This means that I must therefore
engage in a form of labour that meets a definite social need, in order
that my labour ‘maintain its position as an element of the total labour,
as a branch of the social division of labour, which originally springs up
spontaneously’.4 There is a kind of recognition at issue in this: recog-
nition through social exchange. Exchange of my products represents
recognition of my fulfilment of a role in the social division of labour, in
the satisfaction of the needs of my community as a whole. Inversely, it
is also the condition on the community’s satisfying my needs. The social
division of labour, in other words, refers to the at least potentially
socially integrating mutual dependence of human beings for the satis-
faction of their needs. The importance of labour is, as Marx and Hegel
agree, more than mere consumption; but it is also, for Marx, more than
the metabolism of ‘man’ and nature understood as the dialectical praxis
of private individuals. Yet, since quantity of abstract labour time and not
use-value or need satisfaction is the standard of exchange in commodity
regimes, changes in the conditions of production altering the product-
ivity or efficiency of labour – inclement weather, poor harvests, tech-
nical innovations, overproduction – have the effect of determining the
extent of this recognition for any given producer or class of producers.

938
These anti-social social processes, as Marx says, go on ‘behind the backs
of producers’.5
These magnitudes [of exchange] vary continually, independently of the will,
foreknowledge, and actions of the exchangers. Their own movement within
society has for them the form of a movement made by things, and these
things, far from being under their control, in fact control them.6
In other words, there is a tension between recognition, which is in prin-
ciple correlated to a social division of labour based on need satisfaction,
and a practice of negotiating attempts at or claims to recognition in
complete abstraction from these needs.
Thus it comes about that the social relations that lie at the base of
the social division of labour are concealed by the emergence of capital-
ist modes of production (which I have not yet really discussed in any
detail) and exchange (which, for Marx, is entailed by the form of
production, here by privately owned means); and this suppression of the
social character of labour, manifest in the subordination of use-value to
exchange-value, results in the irrationality of a system prone to crises
of overproduction, for example. As E. P. Thompson wrote of the early
working class in Britain, ‘from the standpoint of the toilers’, it was not
the critique of capitalism and the projection of utopian alternatives that
was ‘mad’, but ‘a social system in which steam and new machinery
evidently displaced and degraded labourers, and in which the markets
could be “glutted” while the unshod weaver sat in his loom and the
shoemaker sat in his workshop with no coat on his back’.7 It is true
that these are crises in the material reproduction of society, and that this
was Marx’s focus; but he is far from ignoring their effects upon the indi-
vidual, whose attempts at winning recognition (including both recog-
nition of their own needs in the form of satisfaction, as well as, in
Honneth’s terms, ‘esteem’ for their contribution to the social division of
labour) must be mediated by this system, since he is equally and perhaps
even foremost at pains to explain why the capitalist organization of
production and exchange are, according to his conception of human
beings, de-humanizing, resulting in ‘the conversion of things into persons
and the conversion of persons into things’.8
Since the producers do not come into social contact until they exchange the
products of their labour, the specific social characteristics of their private
labours appear only within this exchange. In other words, the labour of
the private individual manifests itself as an element of the total labour of
society only through the relations which the act of exchange establishes be-
tween their products, and, through their mediation, between the producers.
To the producers, therefore, the social relations between their private labours
appear as what they are, i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations
between persons in their work, but rather as material [dinglich] relations be-
tween persons and social relations between things.9

939
In order to see this suppression of social relations as a contradiction
inherent in capitalism, it is necessary to retain the conception of human
nature developed by Marx initially in the Paris Manuscripts, but which
is operative also in Capital.10 It is true, as structuralists will insist, that
Marx claims in several places in the latter that he considers capitalists
and workers alike to be the mere bearers or placeholders in socio-
economic processes he describes as the inevitable workings of an estab-
lished system of production.11 But it ought to be clear that for Marx
this is the pathological, historical result of an irrational, de-humanizing
system; it is not an ontology of human society. At the same time, neither
does Marx prescind entirely from the intentions of agents in the process:
the capitalist, for instance, is differentiated as the one who intentionally
inverts the exchange relation and buys in order to sell, or who produces
with the aim of attaining exchange- instead of use-value (though ulti-
mately the goal is to realize profit, surplus value).12 The following passage
contains both of these points in juxtaposition:
As conscious bearer [Träger] of this movement, the possessor of money
becomes a capitalist. His person, or rather his pocket, is the point from
which the money starts, and to which it returns. The objective content of
the circulation we have been discussing – the valorization of value – is his
subjective purpose, and it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more
wealth in the abstract is the sole driving force behind his operations that
he functions as a capitalist, i.e. as capital personified and endowed with
consciousness and a will.13
This significantly suggests that the human nature of the person is not
exhausted by his or her function as capitalist: the intentions of the agent
remain the driving force, yet the perversion of her or his circumstances
is such that only through a complete reduction of the self to a single
social role can these intentions be adequately realized. In other words,
the capitalist, too, is alienated (a point Marx makes repeatedly14) because
his species-being, his real social nature, is, in Habermas’ language,
‘colonized’ by his economic role. He must work long hours at the firm,
climb the corporate ladder; he must sacrifice his other interests, his time
with his family, etc. Sensitivity to this feature of Marx’s analysis of capi-
talism serves to undermine the contention of so many modern writers
– among whom Honneth may be counted – that by the time of Capital,
Marx’s philosophy is normatively based solely on a utilitarian appeal
to the interests of the proletariat and hence, once the practical short-
comings of that grounding are revealed (in the course of history), we can
respectfully brush Marx aside. There is a distinction to be made between
the question of historical addressee (a matter of the relation of theory
to practice) and the normative basis upon which a critical theory itself
is constructed. To offer a parallel: Habermas employs his theory of
communicative action in his formulation of the concept of the lifeworld,

940
which is said to rely ineliminably on communication for its reproduc-
tion; this allows him to identify ‘colonization’ of the lifeworld by system
as illegitimate (there are additional reasons relating to the integrity of
the individual and his or her cultural context but these, too, come back
to the, in this case socializing, role of communication in the lifeworld).
But Habermas also uses this two-tiered theory of system and lifeworld,
along with the idea of colonization, to explain the existence and articu-
late the interests of contemporary protest potential – that is, those groups
such as the environmental movement who, because of their strategic
position in society (along the border of system and lifeworld and, indi-
vidually, without heavy investment in core areas of the capitalist econ-
omy), both provide confirmation for Habermas’ social theory and are
likely to be amenable to its message.15 Both levels of analysis are clearly
discernible in Marx as well – i.e. we can distinguish between his desire
to appeal to the practical position of the proletariat as an instrument of
revolution and his theoretical justification of the belief that capitalism
ought to be undone – though perhaps Marx himself was not always as
clear and consistent in this distinction as he ought to have been. None-
theless, only a remarkably obtuse reading of Capital could issue in the
view that Marx’s answer there to the question of ‘what is wrong with
capitalism’ is nothing more than that it offends the interests of a single
social class.
The notion of the species-being of human beings and its fate under
capitalism, including now the issue of production, is most explicitly
treated in Marx’s early discussion of ‘Estranged Labour’ in the Economic
and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. There Marx claims that human
beings are species-beings because they are able to treat themselves ‘as
the actual, living species . . . as a universal and therefore free being’.16
It is perhaps less than immediately obvious what Marx intends by this.
He seems to begin with two premises, both of which are, again, still
operative in the later work. The first, noted already, is that human beings
are essentially social.17 The second is that human beings live in and upon
nature, through labour. In Capital Marx recalls:
Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by
which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the
metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of
nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which
belong to his own body . . . in order to appropriate the materials of nature
in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon
external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes
his own nature.18
Through this process, one of the changes that may take place is that the
labourer comes to see himself or herself as ‘universal’ in the peculiarly
Hegelian sense that denotes ‘Self-Consciousness’; a universal, in this

941
vocabulary, is something that is for-itself (understands itself to be) what
it is in-itself (in essence). According to Marx, for human beings it is
labouring praxis that allows us to come to an awareness of ourselves
as social beings existing together in dependence upon nature. Though
Marx often focuses on a single individual in his exegesis of the action
of labouring, concretely – at least since the beginning of agriculture
10,000 years ago – this entails coming to an awareness of our place in
a social division of labour. ‘The object of labour’, Marx writes, ‘is, there-
fore, the objectification of man’s species life: for he duplicates himself
not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality,
and therefore he contemplates himself in a world that he has created.’19
This bears on the freedom mentioned in Marx’s definition of species-
being, and lost under capitalism, which is likewise to be understood in
the Hegelian sense: in seeing the world as a product of our natural
activity, in participating through our labour in the creation of a rational
order, we transform our dependence upon nature not into a nihilistic
freedom or a lack of constraint but into a relation of autonomy, a form
of self-recognition that is potentially both individual and collective (as
we consider it to be in democracy, for instance).20 Yet with the emer-
gence of capitalist production the worker is divorced from the product,
which belongs to someone else. She is alienated from the process, such
that her mind is no longer engaged and her work is confined to a dis-
connected fragment of the whole – the meaningfulness of work is lost.
As a direct result, she is alienated from her distinctly human (i.e., social)
function, her species-being, such that she only feels at home in her animal
(i.e., egoistic) functions; her species life is turned into a means to her
individual life – she works only in order to survive. And because of all
this, she is alienated from other human beings: ‘In fact, the proposition
that man’s species nature is estranged from him means that one man
is estranged from the other, as each of them is from man’s essential
nature.’21
Honneth actually concedes, in a discussion of the various heirs of
Hegel less constant than himself, that the early Marx here under discus-
sion was, as I have argued, concerned with the problematics of recog-
nition, though in a way one-sidedly limited to the domain of labour.
But Marx bases his initial philosophical anthropology on a concept of labour
which is so normatively charged that he can construe the act of production
itself as a process of intersubjective recognition. In the course of fully inte-
grated labour – which is conceived of on the model of artistic or craft acti-
vities – the experience of having an ability objectified is so intertwined with
the mental [geistige] anticipation of a possible consumer that this experi-
ence gives the individual an intersubjectively mediated feeling of self-worth
. . . in the mirror of the object produced, one can not only experience
oneself as an individual possessed of particular abilities but also understand
oneself to be a person capable of providing for the needs of a concrete

942
partner in interaction. From this perspective, Marx views capitalism – that
is, a single class’s control of the means of production – as a social order
that inevitably destroys the interpersonal relations of recognition mediated
by labour. For, in being cut off from the means of production, workers also
have the possibility for independently controlling their activity torn away
from them, control that represents a social precondition for their being
able to recognize each other as co-operative partners within a context of
community life.22
According to Honneth, this view of production, which allows Marx to

interpret attempts to regain the autonomy of labour as struggles for the
possibility of recognition, is renounced in the later Marx. And rightly
so, he believes, since he dismisses it as based on an implausible ‘expres-
sionist’ conception of human nature, on ‘untenable premises’ underlying
a philosophy of history, burdensome Feuerbachian ideas of projection
and a psychological error that conceives of abilities as already present
in the mind and subsequently recognized in their objectification. The
later Marx, he goes on, retains the idea ‘that labour represents not only
the societal creations of value but also the externalization of essential
human energies’, but Honneth asserts that he gives up his Feuerbachian
conception of unalienated labour ‘interpreted as a kind of loving affirma-
tion of the neediness of all other members of the species’.23 In its place,
Capital offers a purely utilitarian perspective according to which ‘the
idea that there is a connection between one’s position in the production
process and one’s moral experiences resulting from disappointed identity-
claims is nowhere to be found’.24 Since labour no longer entails the recog-
nition of others, the struggle between classes for control over production
is nothing more than the conflict of interest positions.
Honneth’s main contention here has already been dispatched: I have
just finished stressing that, though Marx (surely not wrongly) thought
the immediate overcoming of capitalism to be demonstrably in the self-
interest of the proletariat and thus that they were most amenable to his
insights into the essential injustice of capitalism, the analysis of Capital
focuses on capitalism as inherently irrational and de-humanizing, speci-
fically because of its anti-social organization of the division of labour
with its effects both on recognition through exchange and recognition
through production.25 Moreover, there is no reason to see Marx, as
Honneth does, as having naively believed that the (‘normatively charged’)
fact of production consummates the recognition of our capacities. Labour
does indeed objectify species-life, and so the private act of labour might
be thought relevant to an account of the modes of recognition. Yet given
Marx’s insistence on the social character of labour it is clear that, for him,
recognition waits upon the actuality and not merely the anticipation of
exchange, the social interaction in which the needs of both parties are
recognized.26 Honneth’s one-sided picture of labouring individuals, which

943
fails to take account of the connection Marx insisted on between forms
of production and exchange, undermines our ability to see why Marx
always held the capitalist market to be anti-social and irrational, and
why its irrationality is relevant to the possibility of recognition.27
On the issue of production, however, something does, in the end, need
to be said about Marx’s development. The discussion of alienated labour
in the Paris Manuscripts leads, by way of inversion, to the problematic
picture of un-alienated labour in the ‘German Ideology’, that famous
image of the citizen who ‘hunts in the morning, fishes in the afternoon,
rears cattle in the evening, and criticizes after dinner’.28 As attractive as
such a model was to early workers’ movements29 – and understandably
so – Marx’s simultaneous acceptance of Adam Smith’s analysis of the
leading role of the increasing division of labour in the productivity of
capitalist wealth makes this model paradoxical since, inferring in the
other direction, a society in which such alienation is overcome would,
by implication, be an impoverished one. Of course, beyond this, it is
also hard to see how the model could apply to an industrialized, highly
technical society, with its training and specialized knowledge require-
ments. Though Marx did not resolve this issue until Capital, on the basis
of the distinction between the division of labour in manufacture (aimed
at the creation of surplus-value) and the social division of labour
(aimed at the satisfaction of needs), it is important to note that the basic
resources for answering it are already there in the Economic and Philo-
sophic Manuscripts of 1844; namely, in the claim that being unalienated
is about being able to see oneself as the universal – that is, it is about
the ranging of one’s mind far more than of one’s body. In other words,
the meaningfulness of work, which is the heart of the production dimen-
sion of the recognition of labour, is about one’s ability to see one’s work
as meaningful. At some point, to be sure, the de-skilling involved in
physical divisions threatens this possibility; but long before that, it is the
removal of control from the worker which, for Thompson as for Marx
(and as Honneth recognizes), is the crux of the disrespect and injury
inflicted by capitalist relations of production. But, once again, Honneth’s
atomic picture of the labourer prevents the insight attained by both
Marx and the workers’ movements that Thompson describes: autonomy
lost at the individual level of the artisan can, once the initial nostalgia
for paternalistic society has been overcome, be regained at the level of
the collective.30 A labourer who performs one part in a process over
which she or he, in society with others, exercises control can see that
part as a meaningful one and can see the satisfaction that that product
provides for others (achieved through social exchange) as a recognition
of her or his labour. Of course, in order to avoid irrational frustrations
here, and the consequent fetishizing of commodities described by Marx,
one would need to rationalize the process of exchange as well.31

944
II Marx contra Honneth
It might seem that everything I have argued to this point is consonant

with the claim that Honneth’s recognition-theoretic model merely requires
supplementation by Marxian insights involving the need for recognition
of one’s meaningful place in the social division of labour and, perhaps
more importantly, that the nature of capitalist production and capitalist
markets frustrate this need. Yet it turns out that this task is not so
straightforward. Honneth has not, as Taylor has, simply neglected this
additional issue; rather, his theory is constructed in such a way as to
make this simple supplementation impossible. It does so in at least three
ways: (1) Honneth over-generalizes from claims regarding the motivation
for social struggle to claims about its remedies and aims; (2) he distin-
guishes between obstacles to strategic versus communicative success while
rejecting the parallel Habermasian distinction between system and life-
world, leading him to discount a priori the possibility of genuinely
systematic obstacles to recognition claims; and (3) his culturalistic crit-
icism of the system/lifeworld distinction is overstated on one side, and
misses the more apt opportunity for criticism on the other.
1
It makes good sense, it seems to me, to accept with Honneth that feelings
or perceptions of injustice or disrespect are motivating factors in the
emergence of social struggles – though, to be sure, this casts little light
on solidarity movements in support of the disrespected by the privileged.
And Honneth seems content with this insight about half of the time; for
instance, he argues that what recommends the recognition paradigm is
that it gives ‘an improved insight into the motivational sources of social
discontent and resistance’.32 In light of the critique of Marx advanced
by the Frankfurt School – that the dynamics of capitalism itself pro-
vided only the objective but not the subjective conditions for revolt (i.e.
they do not account for the required consciousness and motivation of
the oppressed) – Honneth’s proposal appears to have real merit.33 The
problem is his too hasty and facile move to conclude from this that,
since recognition is what is denied, achieving recognition is the answer:
indeed, what could be simpler! Nancy Fraser rightly rejoins that Honneth
has over-generalized his moral-psychological claims regarding motiva-
tion, allowing it to determine
. . . how he approaches other key critical tasks, such as identifying hege-

monic grammars of political claims-making, the social processes that insti-
tutionalize injustice, and the normative criteria for adjudicating claims. For
Honneth, in other words, once moral psychology purports to establish that

945
misrecognition is the sole bonafide experience of injustice, then everything
else follows in train: all political demands must be translated into claims
for recognition . . . [Similarly, h]e goes from the true premise that markets
are always culturally embedded to the false conclusion that their behaviour
is wholly governed by the dynamics of recognition . . . [and] from the valid
insight that the capitalist economy is not a purely-technical, culture-free
system to the untenable proposition that it has no economic dynamics worth
analyzing in their own right.34
So far as economic or labour questions are involved, they have,

according to Honneth, to do with disputes over the appropriate inter-
pretation of the principle of achievement according to which, in capi-
talist societies – so we are told – recognition of individual capacities is
regulated.35 For Honneth, distribution questions are epiphenomena of
the pattern of recognized achievement and so struggles for just distribu-
tion are cultural struggles dealing with interpretations of this merito-
cratic rule.36 To allay the concerns of anyone surprised to hear that,
despite all evidence to the contrary, they are living in a meritocratically
ordered society, Honneth will concede that the interpretation of achieve-
ment ‘was hierarchically organized in an unambiguously ideological way
from the start’.37 This includes not only a general rootedness in inter-
pretative patterns of the middle class, but also a naturalistic categoriza-
tion of women’s domestic labour, for example, as outside the pale of
genuine work deserving of public esteem. Because the meritocratic prin-
ciple of recognition contains ‘surplus validity’, however, it is also the
resource to which these excluded groups appeal in attempting to have
their ‘achievements’ socially revalued as something different but worthy.38
He concludes, therefore, that economic-recognition struggles ‘take the
form of social groups, in response to the experience of disrespect for their
actual achievements, attempting to throw the established evaluative
models into question by fighting for greater esteem of their social contri-
butions, and thereby for economic redistribution’.39 This may well be
true in some number of cases,40 but it ignores the Marxian insight that
a capitalist society, geared towards profit and not the recognition of
individual achievement, systematically undercuts the possibility of full
participation by all members of a society and relentlessly devalues and
displaces individuals’ skills as a means to greater profits (an example of
this would be the role of the ‘industrial reserve army’ – that is, the
legions of the unemployed and under-employed – in keeping down the
price of labour). Contra Honneth, then, people who have been brutalized
by capitalism, rendered obsolete, forced into meaningless occupations
or simply excluded as ‘superfluous’, do not desire recognition for their
‘actual achievements’, but an alternative, an opportunity to actually make
a better, more meaningful contribution, a secure means of livelihood that
they, too, can esteem.41 This brings us to the second issue.

946
2
When confronted by Fraser with having ignored the profit motive and
the value blindness of capitalist markets, Honneth first retreats to the
claim that he had sought only to establish that social integration proceeds
by way of mutual recognition, and that these processes put constraints
on the structure of social institutions. Such institutions are, in turn, the
basis of the moral expectations that members have of their society
which, when frustrated, can motivate social struggle. While he insists
that this is not intended to deny the importance of the profit motive, he
goes on to state that he has admittedly ‘conceded a certain primacy to
social integration as against system integration. I continue to assume’,
he writes, ‘that even structural transformations in the economic sphere
are not independent of the normative expectations of those affected, but
depend at least on their tacit consent.’42 This is a surprisingly Lockean
claim. Honneth, after all, is wont to cite E. P. Thompson’s work, among
others, in support of his contention that it is a mistake to see either the
economy or distribution struggles as interest- rather than culture-based;
but Thompson would be quite astonished, I am sure, to hear that the
success of the industrial revolution and the institution of laissez-faire
economics was predicated on the tacit consent and not, as he describes,
the brutal suppression of the workers and the poor.43
It is nevertheless true that, in Habermasian terms, system as a whole
must, in some way, be anchored in the lifeworld: ‘consent’ has typically
played second fiddle to false consciousness and, in particular, to the
suppression of alternatives.44 But this anchoring is not sufficient for
Honneth: he believes that it is a mistake to see capitalism as a ‘norm-
free’ system of interaction, since the recognition order influences distri-
bution.45 As Fraser objects, however, cultural value patterns do not
directly determine the operations of the market, in which wage-rates, for
instance, fluctuate according to supply and demand, and in relation to
. . . the balance of power between labour and capital; the stringency of social
regulations, including the minimum wage; the availability and cost of
productivity enhancing technologies; the ease with which firms can shift their
operations to locations where wage rates are lower. . . . In the broad mix of
relevant considerations, ideologies of achievement are by no means para-
mount. Rather, their effects are mediated by the operation of impersonal
system mechanisms, which prioritize maximization of corporate profits.46
Honneth responds to this by noting that he does not, in fact, see the
labour market as regulated solely by the meritocratic principle of achieve-
ment: it is also, he claims, regulated by law.47 This rather evidently misses
the entire force and point of Fraser’s objection. To the extent that there
is any truth to it, the descriptive conformity of the market to legal or
moral norms today demonstrates nothing so much as the deformity and

947
impoverishment of the latter. Yet Honneth shrugs off the sense in which
the meritocratic principle serves ideologically to mask this lack of legit-
imacy as though it were some kind of peripheral, historical accident. He
is more interested in insisting once again that it is to this very principle
that the excluded must appeal for leverage, which leads him to claim
that the Habermasian view of the economic system as norm-free actually
‘prevents economic processes from being described as open to normative
transformations’.48 But normative transformations are, as far as I can
see, not even on the table for Honneth: the changes he has in mind are
simply cases of greater inclusion into a systematically unaltered capital-
ist economy. More capitalism, however, is not the answer, nor even –
despite its relative desirability – merely better, gentler capitalism.
Though his Hegelian recognition theory retains the structural form
of classical critical theory – that is, of an immanent critique concerned
to root theory in the practical experiences of violated groups49 – his
obliviousness to the systematic aspects of capitalism, and his lack of
interest in any viable alternative, nevertheless make it hard to see why
Honneth conceives of himself as engaged in critical theory at all – that
is, as carrying forward the critical heritage that began, after all, with
Marx. His idealistic conversion is consummated in concluding his re-
joinder to Fraser with claims like the following:
It is probably most important to make clear that the whole opposition of
social and system integration is problematic. It is true that some socially
generalized media, like money or political power, can in fact coordinate
social interaction relatively automatically, but even they depend on some
belief in their legitimacy that can weaken or disappear altogether at any
moment.50
Marx would certainly be the first to observe that this conjuring trick
would likely offer rather meagre solace to those who rely on today’s pay
for tonight’s dinner.
Honneth’s idealism in this regard, his inability to perceive the presence
of systematic obstacles to recognition claims, is just that: an inability,
not simply a contingent oversight. At the very general level of category-
construction, he claims that obstacles to the fulfilment of recognition
claims – which, recall, result in feelings of disrespect and can issue in
social conflict – can be divided, like all human actions, into two
(Habermasian) kinds: frustrations of strategic actions, and frustrations
of normative expectations.
Should actions oriented towards success fail as a result of unanticipated
obstructions, this leads to ‘technical’ disruptions in the broadest sense. By
contrast, should actions guided by norms be repelled by situations because
the norms taken to be valid are violated, this leads to ‘moral’ conflict in the
social lifeworld.51

948
On the basis of this apparently exhaustive categorial distinction, Honneth
is led to conclude that all obstacles to moral progress are cases of conflict
of norms. For instance, struggles of the economically excluded, who must
implicitly be understood to already value their own ‘culturally’ defined
social contribution, come up against ideological prejudices in the minds
of the powerful and in their institutions regarding what kinds of labour
really count as work. In other words, there are no ‘technical’ obstacles
to moral claims, since ‘technical’ obstacles are the sorts of things en-
countered by strategic actors; therefore, the idea that the operations of
the capitalist system could present a so-called ‘technical’ obstacle to the
fulfilment of normatively motivated recognition struggles is a dead end
from the start according to Honneth’s categories.
3
We have already seen how Honneth’s culturalistic criticism of the system/
lifeworld distinction is overstated. But it is rather widely argued, partic-
ularly by those who read Marx more sympathetically than Honneth, that
Habermas has excessively substantialized the distinction and has, as a
result, forfeited a Marxian insight very similar to the one I am raising
here against Honneth: that the illegitimate violence of capitalism is not
confined to the border where the lifeworld is threatened by system
imperatives, but that within the economic/occupational sphere there are
illegitimate forms of capitalist exploitation and de-humanization that
cannot be reduced to the unavoidable pains of modernization.52 The very
same phenonomena I have invoked already – de-skilling, loss of auton-
omy/control over production and exchange – are injustices of capitalism
identified by Marx very much in the spirit, if not always in the vocab-
ulary, of illegitimate frustrations of legitimate recognition-claims. There
is, in other words, an important way in which Honneth’s implausible
wholesale rejection of the system/lifeworld distinction is a part of his
failure to see the important opportunity for critique with which Marx
presents us: the economic/occupational system is indeed not a wholly
norm-free monolith of strategic interests; that is precisely why we require
a theory that enables us to critique where it operates as though it were
one, when, in its pursuit of profit and ceaseless growth, it tramples the
significance that labour and livelihood have or ought to have (or used
to have) for workers of all kinds and strata; when the ability of workers
to regulate autonomously the nature of their interactions is denied; when
the meaningfulness of their effort is shattered by their exclusion from
participation in the formation of purposes and aims for labour and
labouring society. It is Marx and, so far, only Marx who enables us to
see these injustices as failures of recognition. Of course, it is nominally
true that, therefore, recognition would ultimately be the remedy; but

949
that is to say rather little indeed. The concrete demands of a consistent
theory of recognition must be mediated by a critique of the capitalist anti-
social division of labour and the irrationality of the market. As Fraser
concludes,
Today . . . economic transformation is out of fashion, as much of the tradi-
tional institutional content of socialism has proven problematic. But it is a
mistake to conclude that we should drop the idea of deep economic re-
structuring tout court. . . . In today’s neoliberal climate especially, it is
important to retain the general idea of economic transformation, even if
we are currently uncertain of its precise institutional content.53
Philosophy Department, University of Winnipeg, Canada
PSC
Notes
An earlier version of this article was presented under the title ‘The Genesis and
Demands of the Politics of Recognition: Towards a Marxist Hegelianism and
a Hegelian Marxism’, at the Annual Conference of the Society for Phenomen-
ology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), 12 October 2007, Philadelphia. I
would like to thank James L. Marsh and Saskia Hildebrandt for their comments
on that draft, as well as the audience at the conference for their helpful questions.
I would also like to thank the anonymous referees for this journal for their help
regarding some points in need of clarification.
1 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I., trans. B. Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books,
1977), pp. 125–6; hereafter cited as Capital. Initially, only one item expresses
its exchange-value at a time, since it does so in terms of the use-value of the
other item: 1 table is worth 2 coats – this is the result of the perspective of
the exchanger in ordinary exchange, who seeks the satisfaction of their needs
(i.e. a use-value).
2 Of course, Marx notes that this claim needs qualification: if value were
determined by factual labour time, then the incompetence or laziness of a
particular producer would increase rather than decrease the value of his or
her work. We know quite the opposite to hold true (at least in basic produc-
tion); therefore it cannot be the labour time necessary for the individual
worker but the amount of labour time that is socially necessary given the
conditions of production, which determines the value of everyone’s labour
in a given field (Capital, p. 129).
3 ibid., pp. 132–3. Marx gives as examples of a social division of labour that
is not in the service of commodity production Indigenous communities and
the division of labour within a farming family.
4 ibid., p. 166.
5 ibid., p. 201: ‘The social division of labour makes the nature of his labour
as one-sided as his needs are many-sided. This is precisely the reason why

950
the product of his labour serves him solely as exchange-value. But it cannot
acquire universal social validity as an equivalent form except by being
converted into money. That money, however, is in someone else’s pocket.
To allow it to be drawn out, the commodity produced by its owner’s labour
must above all be a use-value for the owner of the money. The labour
expended on it must therefore be of a socially useful kind, i.e. must
maintain its position as a branch of the social division of labour. But the
division of labour is an organization which has grown up naturally, a web
which has been, and continues to be, woven behind the backs of the
producers of commodities.’
6 ibid., p. 167. Marx writes elsewhere that the dual nature of the commodity
is the condition for the rise and fall of the exchange-value of products
independently of the qualitative hierarchies of needs which, while variable
to some extent across cultures or over a lengthy period of development
within a single culture (usually in the sense of expansion to include new
needs), tends to stability in terms of the internal priority of needs in relation
to one another. This is just the opposite of exchange-relations (ibid., p. 137).
7 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York:
Vintage Books, 1966), p. 804.
8 Capital, p. 209.
9 ibid., pp. 165–6. Marx contrasts this with feudal society, wherein
Personal dependence characterizes the social relations of material production as
much as it does the other spheres of life based on that production. But precisely
because relations of personal dependence form the given social foundation, there
is no need for labour and its product to assume a fantastic form different from
their reality. They take the shape, in the transactions of society, of services in
kind and payments in kind. . . . Whatever we may think, then, of the different
roles in which men confront one another in such a society, the social relations
between individuals in their performance of their labour appear at all events as
their own personal relations, and are not disguised as social relations between
things, between the products of labour. (Capital, p. 170)
This relative transparency in feudal social relations is a function of the
unified existence of civil and political society, and of the lack of pretence
toward equality. Charles Taylor notes, though he does so solely with respect
to relations of status-recognition, that the end of feudalism and the emer-
gence of formal equality made recognition an issue by introducing the
conditions under which it could be sought and hence refused (see his ‘The
Politics of Recognition’, in Multiculturalism, ed. Amy Gutmann [Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994], pp. 25–73 [p. 32]). In a parallel
fashion, Marx suggests that the very same structural transformation also
introduced the possibility for widespread, private attempts to attain recip-
rocal recognition of individual labour, as well as the circumstances in which
a legitimate attempt at such could nevertheless fail. Thompson details the
ways in which the beginnings of class struggle in Britain – but only the
beginnings – were permeated by a mournful nostalgia for these paternal-
istic customs of feudalism according to which, though the lord was assured
their dominance, the peasant and artisan were assured their place, too (see
Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, esp. chs 6–9, 12).

951
For a modern equivalent, we can recall the nostalgic reaction against the
emergence of largely unregulated capitalism in the former Soviet Union and
its satellites, a sense that social solidarity including a guarantee of a job –
however much it had been enforced by terror – was being undermined
without recompense.
10 Habermas, agreeing with Honneth, claims that Marx gives up the external-
ization model of labour in Capital in favour of the labour theory of value.
In this case the contradiction at the heart of capitalism is the private appro-
priation by the capitalist of socially produced wealth. Reification is now
explained by the transition from a pre-capitalist form of social integration,
in which action is coordinated through appeal to traditional social norms,
to the capitalist form of system integration through the market. It is the
structure of this market that brings it about that human producers are
subordinated to their products and human relations to the relation between
things (that is, reification and commodity fetishism). (See Jürgen Habermas,
‘A Reply to my Critics’, in Habermas: Critical Debates, ed. John B.
Thompson and David Held [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982], p. 226.)
Habermas’ portrayal, however, is too stark; as I will argue, there is clear
textual evidence to suggest that Marx continues to operate with a concep-
tion of human nature according to which the capitalist instrumentaliza-
tion of labour is a kind of teleological contradiction, not entirely unlike
Habermas’ contention that strategic uses of language such as manipulation
contradict the telos of language and so are normatively criticizable. Never-
theless, at least Habermas’ explanation has the merit of drawing attention
to the fundamental role of the capitalist market in undermining the possi-
bility of intersubjective recognition: this is the key to the argument of this
article.
11 Capital, p. 92.
12 ibid., p. 259.
13 ibid., p. 254.
14 See, for example, Karl Marx, ‘Estranged Labour’, in Economic and Philo-
sophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. M. Milligan (Amherst, NY: Prometheus
Books, 1988), pp. 69–84 (pp. 83–4).
15 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. II, Lifeworld
and System, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1987).
16 ibid., p. 75.
17 Evidence for the continuity of this position can be found in Capital, for
instance, in the claim regarding the ubiquity of cooperative labour in all
epochs, and more explicitly in Marx’s contention that ‘man, if not as
Aristotle thought a political animal, is at all events a social animal’ (Capital,
pp. 443–4. Marx is clear here that in most societies, cooperation in labour
has been characterized by domination.).
18 ibid., p. 283. Cf. p. 133: ‘Labour, then, as the creator of use-values, as useful
labour, is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms
of society; it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism
between man and nature, and therefore of human life itself.’
19 Marx, ‘Estranged Labour’, p. 77. This is precisely where a gap opens
between alienation as externalization, as labouring praxis, and alienation

952
as estrangement (dispossession of the product and means of production),
a gap that Marx accuses Hegel of having idealistically overcome; it is also
where we begin to see what is lost in the opaqueness of capitalist social
relations which, insofar as they present themselves at all, do so as natural,
unquestionable and as anything but the product of human agency.
20 It is nevertheless true that, as numerous critics have observed, Marx often
seems to equate dominance of nature with freedom in a way that is ethically
problematic. At the same time, it should be observed that the kind of
control Marx has in mind is not domination as it has largely come about
in history: there are resources in Marx for an environmental ethics which
would critique the capitalist exploitation of nature for the purposes of
exchange-value and surplus value, from the perspective of a communism
which nevertheless continued to view nature as a use-value for human
beings (which, it seems to me, it would be absurd to deny). Moreover, a
use-value in Marx’s sense is sufficiently broad to include more than mere
production of goods; it includes the spectrum of human needs and not
simply the material. This would not satisfy a Heideggerean, of course, since
nature is still ‘en-framed’, seen as a resource (even if that includes being a
resource for aesthetic contemplation or relaxation), but it may well be a
more consistent position for that. It is not unlike the position defended by
Habermas (see ‘A Reply to my Critics’, p. 241 ff.).
21 ibid., pp. 74–5, 78.
22 Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social
Conflicts, trans. J. Anderson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), p. 146.
23 ibid., pp. 148–9.
24 ibid., p. 149. Honneth, I should note, argues that Marx actually returns to
expressivist themes in the later political writings without ever being able
to reconcile it with the purported utilitarianism of Capital (ibid., p. 150).
25 Marx’s own theoretical descriptions of his mature project often enough
sound reductively materialistic, but it is at least equally clear – as Habermas
also observes (see Knowledge and Human Interest, trans. J. Shapiro [Boston,
MA: Beacon Press, 1971], chs 2–3) – that his empirical analyses of capi-
talism take seriously the role of culture, of communication structures and
institutions, of ideology, of what have been called ‘the hidden injuries of
class’. It may be that Marx never fully resolved the tension between these
two perspectives; nevertheless, Honneth’s ‘periodization’ of Marx is not
merely overly simplistic, but is actually erroneous.
26 It is also worth noting, I think, that Honneth’s claim that Marx relies on
an improbable psychological model is unnecessarily rigid and uncharitable
as a reading. Surely there is nothing so implausible about the claim that
persons engaged in all sorts of activity experience recognition and affirma-
tion from labour that ‘makes a difference’, or ‘leaves a mark’ on the world
(the social or the natural world). This participation in shaping the world,
if it is autonomously directed and meaningful, is very simply what Marx,
I would argue, sees as being systematically undone by capitalism. Beyond
the obvious plausibility of claiming that this is a component of any mean-
ingful life and any fully developed personality, there are empirical studies
which, in broad outlines, support this view (see, for instance, ‘Report of a

953
Special Task Force to the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare’, in
Work in America [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973]; F. Herzberg, Work
and the Nature of Man [London: Staples Press, 1968]; Studs Terkel,
Working [New York: New Press, 1972]).
27 The irrationality of the system Marx is criticizing is in fact rooted in just
such false individualism, for in it rational individual choices actually worsen
the collective predicament – after the fashion of the ‘tragedy of the commons’
– which is precisely why collective action and social solidarity represent the
only alternative. Those two well-known and callous bon mots of British
neo-conservative Margaret Thatcher belong together – that is, it is true that
‘There Is No Alternative (TINA)’, as long as it remains true that ‘there is
no such thing as society’.
28 Karl Marx, ‘The German Ideology’, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 2nd
edn, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 185
(translation altered).
29 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, pp. 788–9.
30 Ultimately, Thompson shows, not even Luddism was a blind rejection of
modernization per se, but the demand that the inevitable pains of the process
be mitigated by rational, social direction (ibid., ch. 12). More to the point,
from the very beginnings of the emergence of true class consciousness, the
movement had ceased to be ‘backward-looking in its outlook’ and instead
commenced with
an acceptance of the enlarged productive powers of steam and the mill. What
was at issue was not the machine so much as the profit-motive; not the size of
the industrial enterprise but the control of the social capital behind it. The
building craftsmen and small masters [for example], who resented control and
the lion’s share of the profits passing to master-builders or contractors, did not
suppose that the solution lay in a multitude of petty entrepreneurs. Rather, they
wished the co-operation of skills involved in the building to be reflected in co-
operative social control. (ibid., p. 804)
Thompson also notes that essential to this control was the ‘not always
explicit . . . [but] dangerous tenet: production must be, not for profit, but
for use’ (ibid., p. 830). This is dangerous, of course, because it is nothing
short of the destruction of the essence of capitalism.
This also ought to sufficiently answer the objection sometimes raised
against Marx that he defended a form of labour derived from a romanti-
cized image of the artisans who were all but extinct by the time he was
writing. Since this form of labour could not sustain modern society, its
loss is nothing more than the unavoidable growing pains of society; more
importantly, so the objection goes, any attempt to offer such an image as
an aim for the future is therefore anachronistic and wrong-headed. This
objection was raised against an earlier version of this paper, presented at
SPEP in 2006. A similar argument is also offered by Honneth in what is
otherwise his most sympathetic treatment of Marx, much of which appears
to have been abandoned by Honneth in more recent discussions (see ‘Work
and Instrumental Action’ in The Fragmented World of the Social (Albany,
NY: SUNY Press, 1990), p. 22ff. As we have just seen, though the autonomy
of the artisan no doubt contrasted attractively with the ‘modern’ forms of

954
labour with which Marx and those who endured the ‘growing pains’ of
society were familiar, the solution to the problem of alienation to be found
in his work, and which the workers themselves hit upon, is neither nostalgia
nor acceptance but radically new forms of cooperation and collectivity.
Habermas, as I have already mentioned, also criticizes Marx for basing
his theory of labour on a romantic and outdated conception of the artisan
which he claims, citing Honneth, has been displaced by industrial labour.
Correspondingly, the concept of labour has been purged of all normative content
in industrial sociology and has been discharged from the role of an emancipa-
tory driving-force in social philosophy. If we add to this the trends towards short-
ening working time and towards a corresponding devaluation of the relevance
of labour within the lifeworld, then it becomes evident that the historical devel-
opment of industrial labour is cutting the ground from under the philosophy of
praxis. But if the production-aesthetic revaluation of industrial labour becomes
irrelevant, the whole problematic shrinks to the sober, social-political size of a
‘humanization of the working world’. (Habermas, ‘A Reply to my Critics’, p. 225)
Habermas offers no justification for the remarkable claim that labour
has become less significant for the lifeworld – of whom? While indeed
compulsory working time has been shortened in Developed nations, at the
same time, particularly in the heavy industries that Marx described (but also,
increasingly, in the professions), working continues to dominate the majority
of the time of workers’ lives. (See, for example, Juliet Schor, The Over-
worked American: the Unexpected Decline of Leisure [New York: Basic
Books, 1991].) In a comment like this, one suspects the distorting influence
of academic distance from the reality of working life for the majority of
people for whom, unfortunately, labour is indeed experienced as entirely
drained of normative content.
Nevertheless, it seems to me essentially correct that the ‘humanization
of the working world’ is what is at issue. Honneth, in the work alluded
to above (‘Work and Instrumental Action’), attempts to reinterpret the
critical conception of labour formulated as praxis in terms of the feelings
of disrespect experienced by workers who are victims of capitalist instru-
mentalization. These feelings motivate resistance strategies that are widely
documented in industrial production (work stoppages, slowing the line, etc.).
But, Habermas claims, even if we assume that the aim of such resistance is
autonomy, the justification for such a transformation would have to appeal
to the logic of practical discourse and not to the model of the appropriation
of externalized powers, even reinterpreted recognition-theoretically. Work-
place autonomy has to do with the relations of production, the structure of
domination, and so must ultimately be judged according to the norms of
social interaction. I am inclined to agree that this is the ultimate normative
basis of autonomy; but the justification in discourse may not be quite as
direct as Habermas seems to suggest. In another context, he recognizes that
individuals who are otherwise cognitively capable of participation in dis-
course will be prevented from doing so if they are not able to secure recog-
nition for their needs and identity at the similarly postconventional level (at
which discourse proceeds); (see Moral Consciousness and Communicative
Action, trans. C. Lenhardt and S. Weber Nicholsen [Cambridge, MA: MIT

955
Press, 1990]). But this holds a fortiori for political discourse as well, through
which diverse citizens are normatively integrated. In other words, while it
may well be that it is only through participation in discourse that autonomy,
even workplace autonomy, is ultimately justified, nevertheless the recog-
nition for one’s needs that can be attained only through the achievement
of workplace autonomy may actually be a precondition of participation
in such discourse, a precondition of the stabilization of one’s identity as a
member of society. This is particularly clear with respect to the connection
between the recognition of the skills of immigrants and the extent of their
social integration. Honneth himself notes something similar in another paper
(see ‘The Social Dynamics of Disrespect: Situating Critical Theory Today’,
in Habermas: A Critical Reader, ed. Peter Dews [Oxford and Malden, MA:
Blackwell Publishers, 1999], pp. 329–30, 334).
31 Though it is perhaps unnecessary to offer additional suggestions for the
continued relevance of this recognition-possibility to be drawn from Marx,
it is worth noting – and this is yet another indication that the physical
division of labour processes is of secondary importance – that the alien-
ation of labour in precisely Marx’s sense has only spread since Marx’s time
and has been widely documented in empirical social studies: in the service
industry (see George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society [Thousand
Oaks, CA and London: Pine Forge Press, 1996]); in the colonization of the
medical industry by HMOs that circumscribe the treatment and diagnostic
options of physicians (see Simon Head, The New Ruthless Economy: Work
and Power in the Digital Age [New York: Oxford University Press, 2003]);
in the bureaucratization of education, etc. In addition, if I can suggest a
somewhat extreme but illuminating empirical support for the negative
claim that the performance of meaningless work is experienced as de-
humanization: it has been reported by survivors that the use of senseless
or meaningless labour in Nazi concentration camps was found to be among
the most effective ways of demolishing the sense of human selfhood (see
Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996],
including esp. the Afterword).
32 Axel Honneth, ‘Redistribution as Recognition: a Response to Nancy Fraser’,
trans. J. Golb and J. Ingram, in Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-
Philosophical Profile (New York: Verso, 2003), pp. 110–97 (p. 125). See
also ibid., p. 131, where Honneth’s discussion of research trends supporting
his thesis all stress the motivational role of disrespect resulting from frus-
trated expectations of society in preference to ascribed interest positions.
33 Once again, however, Honneth’s statement of the issue is misleading: he
claims that the lesson of the Frankfurt School was that the shift of emphasis
from the interests of the proletariat to the practice of social labour was
inadequate, since ‘the practice of social labour could not automatically
produce an emancipatory interest’ and itself tended toward the reification
of consciousness (‘The Point of Recognition: a Rejoinder to the Rejoinder’,
trans. C. Wilke and J. Ingram, in Redistribution or Recognition?, pp. 237–67
[pp. 239–40]). What is at issue here under the heading ‘social labour’ is,
as far as I can tell, the concentrated conditions of work in a factory, with
its highly specialized divisions of the production process, modelled on the

956
division of labour in manufacture. This objective condition, Marx had
thought, would lead to the emergence of a subjective consciousness of
exploitation: but the reason for that, whether borne out in practice or not,
is that this division of labour is anti-social and de-humanizing. The turn to
Kulturkritik by the Frankfurt School leaves the question of a genuinely
social division of labour as an aim of transformation totally unaddressed,
as, of course, does Honneth himself. (In a short paper on the situation of
critical theory today, written before the debate with Fraser, Honneth very
suggestively argues that a new, revitalized conception of labour and its
importance is required, one that avoids both the pitfalls of Marx’s roman-
ticism but also the trivialization of labour that he sees in Habermas’ theory
of communicative action. The concept Honneth has in mind should be
serviceable for explaining the importance that recognition for one’s labour
holds in the development of personality [which is evident, inversely, in the
traumatic psychological effects of unemployment]. However, though he does
not in this paper articulate this conception himself, his concluding sugges-
tions tell us well enough that it is none other than the entirely culturalized
conception he employs later in the debate with Fraser: the discussion begun
by feminists regarding unpaid domestic work, he claims, is the most im-
portant field for the articulation of this conception; and, as we know, the
problem with such unpaid domestic work, according to Honneth, is entirely
unsystematic; it encounters nothing more than prejudice in the value system
of a culture. See ‘The Social Dynamics of Disrespect’, p. 330 ff.)
34 Nancy Fraser, ‘Distorted Beyond All Recognition: a Rejoinder to Axel
Honneth’, in Redistribution or Recognition? , pp. 198–236 (see pp. 206,
216).
35 This is the result of the political displacement of questions of individual
status, which is itself the result of the emergence of formal equality in legal
relations, a development which Marx, too, discusses in the first section of
‘On the Jewish Question’ (first published in 1844). It is perhaps worth
noting that Habermas argues that contemporary society has, in recognizing
the market to be an unreliable negotiator of equal recognition, shifted the
burden onto education: equal opportunity for achieving qualifications
through education is the condition on the acceptability of the ‘meritocratic’
pattern of the distribution in the economy/occupational sphere. For this
reason (among others), the place of education (as a practice) and the school
(as an institution) in society ought to be tremendously important for contem-
porary critical theory. My own research project at present is concerned with
this issue.
36 Honneth, ‘Redistribution as Recognition’, pp. 137, 140.
37 ibid., p. 141.
38 ibid., p. 153.
39 ibid., p. 154; emphasis added.
40 Even where it is true, however, so far as I can tell there are still no ‘pure’
cultural cases; rather, the ideological distortions are always functional in
some way (often in very surprising ways) for the reproduction of society.
For instance, Paul Willis details the way in which sexism serves to vindicate
the desirability of manual labour in unpleasant conditions for working class

957
males who ‘freely’ choose it, despite their awareness of its inherent meaning-
lessness, as an expression of their masculinity. Other forms of labour are
accordingly coded as ‘cissy’, or effeminate and therefore (as associated with
women) undignified or less worthy of respect (see his Learning to Labour:
How Working Class Kids get Working Class Jobs [New York: Columbia
University Press, 1977], ch. 6). From the perspective of women, then, it is
quite true that prejudices regarding the nature of labour in the minds of men
prevent the revaluing of their social contributions (typically naturalized, as
Honneth and Willis agree); yet it cannot be ignored (as Honneth consist-
ently does) that the sexism that prevents this revaluing – and which perhaps
even more crucially prevents solidarity among the working class – serves
a crucial legitimation function that capitalist society cannot simply do
without. In a liberal democracy, workers cannot credibly be seen as being
straightforwardly or openly coerced into the choices that, in the end,
reproduce their class; the sexism of working class culture is, according to
Willis’ analysis, one of the key tools by which the needs of reproduction
are met through the uncoerced (if not entirely free) choices of citizens.
41 In a similar vein, Nancy Fraser aptly remarks that Honneth’s culturalized
account has nothing whatever to say to the worker who loses her job as a
result of a speculative merger, yet who rightly feels that recognition of her
contribution to society has been callously denied – and this, of course, is a
not uncommon occurrence in a system governed exclusively by the pursuit
of profit (see her ‘Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics: Redistri-
bution, Recognition, and Participation’, in Redistribution or Recognition?,
pp. 7–109 [see p. 35]).
42 Honneth, ‘The Point of Recognition’, p. 250.
43 Honneth claims that ‘[s]ince the central institutions of even capitalist societies
require rational legitimation through generalizable principles of reciprocal
recognition, their reproduction remains dependent on a basis of moral
consensus – which thus possesses real primacy vis-à-vis other integration
mechanisms’ (‘Redistribution as Recognition’, p. 157). It is remarkable
what a perversion of Thompson’s insights is to be found in such a claim.
Thompson, from whom Honneth borrows the expression ‘moral consensus’,
uses it to refer to the solidaric values of communities uprooted and destroyed
by the Industrial Revolution in Britain; he, like Honneth, is at pains to indi-
cate by this that resistance to these changes was not the result of calculated
interest positions. But Thompson’s book culminates in the betrayal of the
movement which grew out of that consensus, its shattering at the hands of
a police state that incarcerated, beat, murdered and deported people, made
a compromise with the middle class and, finally, succeeded in imposing its
vision and interests upon the people. For Honneth to suggest that that impo-
sition itself relies on a moral consensus, or a process of rational legitimation,
is wrong-headed to put it mildly (see Thompson, The Making of the English
Working Class, especially, in this connection, the first and last chapters).
As for the issue of reproduction itself, it seems Honneth is again over-
generalizing: it is certainly the case that social integration proceeds, by and
large, by reciprocal recognition; but it is absurd to claim that the reproduc-
tion of capitalist institutions proceeds similarly. It is presumably Honneth’s

958
culturalizing of the economic that leads him to suggest such a thing, though
it is indeed far from obvious that even ordinary cultural reproduction can
be attributed to reciprocal recognition, rather than, at least more directly,
to an array of instruments of socialization. It is clear, in any case, that the
central institution of capitalist society, the institution of class, is perpetu-
ated on the basis neither of the moral consensus of society nor of rational
legitimation. Willis offers a far more sophisticated and dialectical explana-
tion of the reproduction of class which, like Honneth and Thompson, sees
working-class culture as more central than mere interest, and which eschews
simplistic reductions to false consciousness or to coercion, yet which does
not whitewash the fact that working class (and increasingly, I would add,
middle-class) workers end up alienated, entrapped and excluded from the
wealth they create and from those who enjoy it. For Willis, the central insti-
tutions of capitalist society are, in the end, reproduced by the system’s
exploitation of the long-term deformity of a near-term collective learning
process in working-class culture, which is itself predominantly a reaction
to the institution of the school and its values under capitalism. In the short
term, the oppositional culture that develops among working-class kids in
and against the school eases the transition to the working world, which is
even celebrated as a kind of freedom; in the longer term, the truth that it
is in fact enslavement comes simultaneously with the fatalistic belief that
it is now too late to escape. (Increasingly, for young people of the middle
class, or generally for those who accept the culture of the school, the
disjunction between the meritocratic promise of education-as-qualification
and the realities of alienated white-collar work in Taylorized and surveilled
corporations retains the more immediate character of a simple Bait and
Switch, as Barbara Ehrenreich has titled her new book on this topic.)
44 For a similar argument regarding the lack of actual legitimation in modern
capitalist societies, which are stabilized instead through fragmented con-
sciousness and a widespread sense of a lack of alternatives (in this case
offered as a criticism of Habermas’ theory of social integration in Legitima-
tion Crisis), see David Held, ‘Crisis Tendencies, Legitimation and the State’,
in Habermas: Critical Debates.
45 Honneth, ‘Redistribution as Recognition’, p. 142.
46 Fraser, ‘Distorted Beyond All Recognition’, p. 214.
47 Honneth, ‘The Point of Recognition’, p. 251.
48 ibid., p. 252.
49 Honneth has detailed his understanding of the nature of critical theory in
several places; for the most succinct version of which I am aware, see ‘The
Social Dynamics of Disrespect’.
50 ibid., p. 255.
51 Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, p. 137.
52 Honneth himself had, much earlier, raised this very concern in a relatively
Marxian critique of Habermas. However, Honneth has evidently since
abandoned the position on which this critique was based, particularly
regarding its comparatively charitable reading of Marx as well as its much
broader account of the critical interest of labour (see ‘Work and Instru-
mental Action,’ p. 45ff). For criticisms of the ontologization of the system/

959
lifeworld distinction see, for example, David Ingram, Habermas and the
Dialectic of Reason (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press,
1987); James L. Marsh, ‘What’s Critical about Critical Theory?’, in
Perspectives on Habermas, ed. Lewis Hahn (Chicago, IL and LaSalle: Open
Court, 2000), pp. 555–67; Raymond A. Morrow and Carlos Alberto Torres,
Reading Freire and Habermas: Critical Pedagogy and Transformative Social
Change (New York: Teacher’s College Press, 2002).
The system/lifeworld distinction is, in fact, less straightforward than
many common criticisms suppose. I can’t offer more than a brief summary
here of a reading of Habermas which I intend to defend in detail elsewhere.
But it is nevertheless worth mentioning at least the following: Habermas’
explication of the system/lifeworld distinction, in both Legitimation Crisis
and in The Theory of Communicative Action, is methodological rather than
directly substantive in nature: that is, these terms refer to a difference of
theoretical perspectives and not to segments of reality. However, when the
economy is organized according to a market system and the political
apparatus as a bureaucracy, these social subsystems become impervious to
the hermeneutic methods which produced the concept of the lifeworld.
Even then, Habermas insists that the need to conceptualize such subsystems
from within the perspective of systems theory ought not to prevent us from
seeing that there are normative dimensions to the economy, for instance,
in the relations of production which characterize the occupational sphere
(see Legitimation Crisis, trans. T. McCarthy [Boston, MA: Beacon Press,
1975], p. 6). Nevertheless, it is the historical fact of the capitalist organi-
zation of production and exchange, and not a sociological a priori on
Habermas’ part, that requires of participants that they adopt a strategic
attitude (toward maximizing personal gain) and of theorists that they turn
their attention to the functional (or dysfunctional) interweaving of action
consequences.
Things stand differently with respect to the lifeworld, which is not a
symmetrical construction: Habermas has not defended the claim that the
lifeworld is a haven of communicative action; his position, instead, is that
the reproduction of the lifeworld requires a more or less counterfactual
presupposition of orientations toward communicative action on the part
of interaction partners. Empirical relations of power are parasitic upon
these presuppositions. It must be admitted that Habermas’ use of language
is very much to blame for the misunderstanding, in particular, his claim
regarding the ‘uncoupling of system from lifeworld.’ However, the real
critical problem in Habermas is not ontologization, but his limitation of
critique to the problem of colonization, and his consequent acceptance of
the internal structure of the capitalist economic system.
53 Fraser, ‘Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics’, p. 74.

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Philosophy & Social Criticism

Labour, exchange and recognition: Marx contra Honneth

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Labour, exchange and

Abstract This article explores Marx’s contention that the achievement of

PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM • vol 35 no 8 • pp. 935–959

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I Capitalism and recognition

According to Marx, the emergence of modern civil society in the over-

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The totality of heterogeneous use-values or physical commodities reflects

Marx notes that exchange-relations that begin as relatively periph-

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According to Honneth, this view of production, which allows Marx to

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It might seem that everything I have argued to this point is consonant

. . . how he approaches other key critical tasks, such as identifying hege-

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So far as economic or labour questions are involved, they have,

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Philosophy Department, University of Winnipeg, Canada

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