ABSTRACT
Jürgen Habermas's project of a reformulation of critical social theory was from the very beginning characterized by a confrontation with Marx and the Marxist tradition. In particular, their concepts of labor, production, and social synthesis repeatedly gained Habermas's attention and became objects of his critique. In this chapter, the author focuses on the dimension of social theory. Since Knowledge and Human Interests, and culminating in his critique of production paradigm in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Habermas attributes to Marx a model of social synthesis through "labor". The author has only been able to indicate that Habermas systematically misses Marx's concept of the double character of labor and lacks categorical access to the value-theoretical level of Marx's work. It is, therefore, a regression behind Marx's insights into the nature of capitalism when Habermas reduces economic domination to the normative assignment of roles and conceives of autonomized forms of wealth such as money and capital as neutral forms of social unity.
