rate of unemployment or very low wages), the whole indirect wage, which
the welfare state had the role of administering, was under challenge: pensions,
public transport, health, education, when not already privatised and subject
to the laws of the market, were threatened with so being in the short term.
These developments were accompanied by a loss of confidence in
parliamentary democracy, which seemed like the mask for a power relation,
and in international institutions, whose ‘democratic’ resolutions applied to
Serbs and Iraqis, but not Israelis or Turks. The imperialist war in Iraq, conducted
in total contempt for UN resolutions, as well as the discussions in the UN
preceding the war, which had nothing to do with an ethics of discussion and
everything to do with the imposition of their imperial will by the dominant
Anglo-American imperialist countries via threats and corruption, are striking
examples of the inability of Habermas’s irenic philosophy to account for the
most commonplace facts.
The consequence of the change in conjuncture is that Marxist concepts are
once again relevant and their eclipse seems to have been temporary. Ten years
ago, the old concept of imperialism was outmoded; today, it serves directly
to account for US policy. Ten years ago, any critique of bourgeois democracy
was a capitulation to totalitarianism; today, the limits of representative
democracy are daily plainly apparent (massive expression of the popular will
did nothing to prevent the British government from embarking on the
imperialist adventure: the lies of the ‘dossiers’ presented to parliament in
order to secure a majority do not help to enhance popular confidence in the
democratic character of representative democracy). Ten years ago, it seemed
that the urgent thing was to develop a moral theory to replace the cynicism
of the power relations analysed by Marxists; today, the ethical pronouncements
of Bush and Blair seem like the height of hypocrisy, a trompe-l’oeil, an
ideological weapon to camouflage the most violent and least consensual of
practices. Ten years ago, the Western democracies had won the Cold War
because they defended human rights by equipping themselves with an effective
system of legal protection; today, American treatment of prisoners of war
from Afghanistan in Guantanamo and the extension of the state of exception
force us to ask if Carl Schmitt’s decisionism (sovereign is he who decides the
state of exception) is not a more useful instrument for describing the policy
of the US administration than Habermas’s ethical universalism.
The conjuncture of Habermas has therefore been superseded. Today,
Habermas finds himself in a position of weakness with respect to the Marxism
Critique of the Philosophy of Language • 61