Instrumental Reason

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Intrumental Reason

"What we need today is not the passage from the 'critique of political economy' to the transcendental-ontological 'critique of instrumental reason', but a return to the 'critique of political economy' that would reveal how the standard Communit project was utopian precisely in so far as it was not radical enough - in so far as, in it, the fundamental capitalist thrust of unleashed productivity survived, deprived of its concrete contradictory conditions of existence. The insufficiency of Heidegger, Adorno and Horkheimer, and so on, lies in thier abandonment of the concrete social analysis of capitalism: in their very critique or overcoming of MArx, they in a way repeat Marx's mistake - like Marx, they perceive unbridled producitvity as something that is ultimately independent of he concrete capitalist social formation. Capitalism and Communism are not two different historical realizations, two species, of 'instrumental reason' - instrumental reason as such is capitalist, grounded in capitalistrelations; and 'actually existing Socialism' failed because it was ultimately a subspecies of capitalism, an ideological attempt to 'have one's cake and eat it', to break out of capitalism while retaining its key ingredient.[1]

See Also

  • Žižek, S. (2000) The Fragile Absolute, or Why the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting For, London and New York: Verso. p. 18