Let me turn, then, to Habermas’s account of late welfare state capitalism. I
must acknowledge at the outset that its critical potential, unlike the critical
potential of his account of classical capitalism, cannot be released simply by reconstructing the unthematized gender subtext. Here, the problematical features of his social-theoretical framework tend to inflect the analysis as a whole and diminish its capacity to illuminate the struggles and wishes of contemporary women. In order to show how this is the case, I shall present Habermas’s view in the form of six theses.
First, welfare state capitalism emerges as a result of, and in response to, instabilities or crisis tendencies inherent in classical capitalism. It realigns the relations between the (official) economy and the state; that is, between the private and public systems. These become more deeply intertwined with one another as the state actively assumes the task of “crisis management.” It tries to avert or manage economic crises by Keynesian “market-replacing” strategies which create a “public sector.” And it tries to avert or manage social and political crises by “market-compensating” measures, including welfare concessions to trade unions and social movements. Thus, welfare state capitalism partially overcomes the separation of public and private at the level of systems.35
Second, the realignment of (official) economy state relations is accompanied by a change in the relations of those systems to the private and public spheres of the lifeworld. With respect to the private sphere, there is a major increase in the importance of the consumer role as dissatisfactions related to paid work are compensated by enhanced commodity consumption. With respect to the public sphere, there is a major decline in the importance of the citizen role as journalism becomes mass media, political parties are bureaucratized, and participation is reduced to occasional voting. Instead, the relation to the state is increasingly channeled through a new role, the social-welfare client.36
Third, these developments are “ambivalent.” On the one hand, there are gains in freedom with the institution of new social rights limiting the heretofore unrestrained power of capital in the (paid) workplace and of the paterfamilias in the bourgeois family, and social insurance programs represent a clear advance over the paternalism of poor relief. On the other hand, the means employed to realize these new social rights tend perversely to endanger freedom. These means—bureaucratic procedure and the money form— structure the entitlements, benefits, and social services of the welfare system, and in so doing, they disempower clients, rendering them dependent on bureaucracies and therapeutocracies and preempting their capacities to interpret their own needs, experiences, and life-problems.37
Fourth, the most ambivalent welfare measures are those concerned with things like health care, care of the elderly, education, and family law, for when bureaucratic and monetary media structure these things, they intrude upon “core domains” of the lifeworld. They turn over symbolic reproduction functions like socialization and solidarity formation to system-integration mechanisms that position people as strategically-acting, self-interested monads. But given the inherently symbolic character of these functions and given their internal relation to social integration, the results, necessarily, are “pathological.” Thus, these measures are more ambivalent than, say, reforms of the paid workplace. The latter bear on a domain that is already system integrated via money and power and which serves material, as opposed to symbolic, reproduction functions. So paid workplace reforms— unlike, say, family law reforms—do not necessarily generate “pathological” side-effects.38
Fifth, welfare state capitalism gives rise to an “inner colonization of the lifeworld.” Money and power cease to be mere media of exchange between system and lifeworld. Instead, they tend increasingly to penetrate the life — world’s internal dynamics. The private and public spheres cease to subordinate (official) economic and administrative systems to the norms, values, and interpretations of everyday life. Rather, the latter are increasingly subordinated to the imperatives of the (official) economy and administration. The roles of worker and citizen cease to channel the influence of the lifeworld to the systems. Instead, the newly inflated roles of consumer and client channel the influence of the system to the lifeworld. Moreover, the intrusion of system-integration mechanisms into domains inherently requiring social integration gives rise to “reification phenomena.” The affected domains are detached not merely from traditional, normatively-secured consensus, but from “value-orientations per se.” The result is the “desiccation of communicative contexts” and the “depletion of the nonrenewable cultural resources” needed to maintain personal and collective identity. Thus, symbolic reproduction is destabilized, identities are threatened, and social crisis tendencies develop.39
Sixth, the colonization of the lifeworld sparks new forms of social conflict specific to welfare state capitalism. “New social movements” emerge in a “new conflict zone” at the “seam of system and lifeworld.” They respond to system-induced identity threats by contesting the roles that transmit these. They contest the instrumentalization of professional labor and of education transmitted via the worker role, the monetarization of relations and lifestyles transmitted via by the inflated consumer role, the bureaucratization of services and life-problems transmitted via the client role, and the rules and routines of interest politics transmitted via the impoverished citizen role. Thus, the conflicts at the cutting edge of developments in welfare capitalism differ both from class struggles and from bourgeois liberation struggles. They respond to crisis tendencies in symbolic as opposed to material reproduction, and they contest reification and “the grammar of forms of life” as opposed to distribution or status inequality.40
The various new social movements can be classified with respect to their emancipatory potential. The criterion is the extent to which they advance a genuinely emancipatory resolution of welfare capitalist crisis, namely, the “decolonization of the lifeworld.” Decolonization encompasses three things: (1) the removal of system-integration mechanisms from symbolic reproduction spheres, (2) the replacement of (some) normatively secured contexts by communicatively achieved ones, and (3) the development of new, democratic institutions capable of asserting lifeworld control over state and (official) economic systems. Thus, those movements like religious fundamentalism, which seek to defend traditional lifeworld norms against system intrusions, are not genuinely emancipatory; they actively oppose the second element of decolonization and do not take up the third. Movements like peace and ecology are better; they aim both to resist system intrusions and also to instate new, reformed, communicatively achieved zones of interaction. But even these are “ambiguous” inasmuch as they tend to “retreat” into alternative communities and “particularistic” identities, thereby effectively renouncing the third element of decolonization and leaving the (official) economic and state systems unchecked. In this respect, they are more symptomatic than emancipatory; they express the identity disturbances caused by colonization. The feminist movement, on the other hand, represents something of an anomaly. It alone is “offensive,” aiming to “conquer new territory,” and it alone retains links to historic liberation movements. In principle, then, feminism remains rooted in “universalist morality.” Yet it is linked to resistance movements by an element of “particularism.” And it tends, at times, to “retreat” into identities and communities organized around the natural category of biological sex.41
Now what are the critical insights and blind spots of this account of the dynamics of welfare state capitalism? To what extent does it serve the selfclarification of the struggles and wishes of the contemporary women? I shall take up the six theses one by one.
Habermas’s first thesis is straightforward and unobjectionable. Clearly, the welfare state does engage in crisis management and does partially overcome the separation of public and private at the level of systems.
Habermas’s second thesis contains some important insights. Clearly, welfare state capitalism does inflate the consumer role and deflate the citizen role, reducing the latter essentially to voting—and, I should add, also to soldiering. Moreover, the welfare state does indeed increasingly position its subjects as clients. On the other hand, Habermas again fails to see the gender subtext of these developments. He fails to see that the new client role has a gender, that it is a paradigmatically feminine role. He overlooks that it is overwhelmingly women who are the clients of the welfare state, especially older women, poor women, and single women with children. Nor does he notice that many welfare systems are internally dualized and gendered, that they include two basic kinds of programs—“masculine” social insurance programs tied to primary labor-force participation and designed to benefit principal breadwinners, and “feminine” relief programs oriented to what are understood as domestic “failures,” that is, to families without a male breadwinner. Not surprisingly, these two welfare subsystems are separate and unequal. Clients of feminine programs, virtually exclusively women and their children, are positioned in a distinctive, feminizing fashion as the “negatives of possessive individuals”; they are largely excluded from the market both as workers and as consumers and are familialized, that is, made to claim benefits not as individuals but as members of “defective” households. They are also stigmatized, denied rights, subjected to surveillance and administrative harassment, and generally made into abject dependents of state bureaucracies.42 But this means that the rise of the client role in welfare state capitalism has a more complex meaning than Habermas allows. It is not only a change in the link between system and lifeworld institutions, it is also a change in the character of male dominance, a shift, in Carol Brown’s phrase, “from private patriarchy to public patriarchy.”43
This gives a rather different twist to the meaning of Habermas’s third thesis. It suggests that he is right about the “ambivalence” of welfare state capitalism—but not quite and not only in the way he thought. It suggests that welfare measures do have a positive side insofar as they reduce women’s dependence on an individual male breadwinner. But they also have a negative side insofar as they substitute dependence on a patriarchal and androcentric state bureaucracy. The benefits provided are, as Habermas says, “system-conforming” ones. But the system they conform to is not adequately characterized as the system of the official, state-regulated capitalist economy. It is also the system of male dominance, which extends even to the sociocultural lifeworld. In other words, the ambivalence here does not only stem, as Habermas implies, from the fact that the role of client carries effects of “reification.” It stems also from the fact that this role, qua feminine role, perpetuates in a new, let us say “modernized” and “rationalized” form, women’s subordination. Or so Habermas’s third thesis might be rewritten in a feminist critical theory—without, of course, abandoning his insights into the ways in which welfare bureaucracies and therapeutocracies disempower clients by preempting their capacities to interpret their own needs, experiences, and life-problems.
Habermas’s fourth thesis, by contrast, is not so easily rewritten. This thesis states that welfare reforms of, for example, the domestic sphere are more ambivalent than reforms of the paid workplace. This is true empirically in the sense I have just described—but it is due to the patriarchal character of welfare systems, not to the inherently symbolic character of lifeworld institutions, as Habermas claims. His claim depends on two assumptions I have already challenged. First, it depends on the natural kinds interpretation of the distinction between symbolic and material reproduction activities; that is, on the false assumption that childrearing is inherently more symbolic and less material than other work. And second, it depends upon the absolute differences interpretation of the system—integrated versus socially integrated contexts distinction, that is, on the false assumption that money and power are not already entrenched in the internal dynamics of the family. Once we repudiate these assumptions, then there is no categorical, as opposed to empirical, basis for differentially evaluating the two kinds of reforms. If it is basically progressive that paid workers acquire the means to confront their employers strategically and match power against power, right against right, then it must be just as basically progressive in principle that women acquire similar means to similar ends in the politics of familial and personal life. And if it is “pathological” that, in the course of achieving a better balance of power in familial and personal life, women become clients of state bureaucracies, then it must be just as “pathological” in principle that, in the course of achieving a similar end at paid work, paid workers, too, become clients—which does not alter the fact that in actuality they become two different sorts of clients. But of course the real point is that the term “pathological” is misused here insofar as it supposes the untenable assumption that childrearing and other work are asymmetrical with respect to system integration.
This sheds new light as well on Habermas’s fifth thesis. This thesis states that welfare state capitalism inaugurates an inner colonization of the life — world by systems. It depends on three assumptions. The first two of these are the two just rejected, namely, the natural kinds interpretation of the distinction between symbolic and material reproduction activities and the assumed virginity of the domestic sphere with respect to money and power. The third assumption is that the basic vector of motion in late capitalist society is from state-regulated economy to lifeworld and not vice versa. But the feminine gender subtext of the client role contradicts this assumption: it suggests that even in late capitalism the norms and meanings of gender identity continue to channel the influence of the lifeworld onto systems. These norms continue to structure the state-regulated economy as the persistence, indeed exacerbation, of labor-force segmentation according to sex shows.44 And these norms also structure state administration, as the gender segmentation of U. S. and European social welfare systems shows.45 Thus, it is not the case that in late capitalism “system intrusions” detach life contexts from “value-orientations per se.” On the contrary, welfare capitalism simply uses other means to uphold the familiar “normatively secured consensus” concerning male dominance and female subordination. But Habermas’s theory overlooks this coun-
termotion from lifeworld to system. Thus, it posits the evil of welfare state capitalism as the evil of a general and indiscriminate reification. It fails, in consequence, to account for that fact that it is disproportionately women who suffer the effects of bureaucratization and monetarization and for the fact that, viewed structurally, bureaucratization and monetarization are, among other things, instruments of women’s subordination.
This entails the revision, as well, of Habermas’s sixth thesis. This thesis concerns the causes, character, and emancipatory potential of social movements, including feminism, in late capitalist societies. Since these issues are so central to the concerns of this paper, they warrant a more extended discussion.
Habermas explains the existence and character of new social movements, including feminism, in terms of colonization, that is, in terms of the intrusion of system-integration mechanisms into symbolic reproduction spheres and the consequent erosion and desiccation of contexts of interpretation and communication. But given the multidirectionality of causal influence in welfare capitalism, the terms “colonization,” “intrusion,” “erosion,” and “desiccation” are too negative and one-sided to account for the identity shifts manifested in social movements. Let me attempt an alternative explanation, at least for women, by returning to Habermas’s important insight that much contemporary contestation surrounds the institution-mediating roles of worker, consumer, citizen, and client. Let me add to these the childrearer role and the fact that all of them are gendered roles. Now, consider in this light the meaning of the experience of millions of women, especially married women and women with children, who have in the postwar period become paid workers and/or social welfare clients. I have already indicated that this has been an experience of new, acute forms of domination; it has also, however, been an experience in which women could, often for the first time, taste the possibilities of a measure of relative economic independence, an identity outside the domestic sphere and expanded political participation. Above all, it has been an experience of conflict and contradiction as women try to do the impossible: to juggle simultaneously the existing roles of childrearer and worker, client, and citizen. The cross-pulls of these mutually incompatible roles have been painful and identity-threatening, but not simply negative.46 Interpellated simultaneously in contradictory ways, women have become split subjects; and, as a result, the roles themselves, previously shielded in their separate spheres, have suddenly been opened to contestation. Should we, like Habermas, speak here of a “crisis in symbolic reproduction?” Surely not, if this means the desiccation of meaning and values wrought by the intrusion of money and organizational power into women’s lives. Emphatically yes, if it means, rather, the emergence into visibility and contestability of problems and
possibilities that cannot be solved or realized within the established framework of gendered roles and institutions.
If colonization is not an adequate explanation of contemporary feminism (and other new social movements), then decolonization cannot be an adequate conception of an emancipatory solution. From the perspective I have been sketching, the first element of decolonization, namely, the removal of system-integration mechanisms from symbolic reproduction spheres—is conceptually and empirically askew of the real issues. If the real point is the moral superiority of cooperative and egalitarian interactions over strategic and hierarchical ones, then it mystifies matters to single out lifeworld institutions—the point should hold for paid work and political administration as well as for domestic life. Similarly, the third element of decolonization—namely, the reversal of the direction of influence and control from system to lifeworld—needs modification. Since the social meanings of gender still structure late-capitalist official economic and state systems, the question is not whether lifeworld norms will be decisive but, rather, which lifeworld norms will.
This implies that the key to an emancipatory outcome lies in the second element of Habermas’s conception of decolonization—namely, the replacement of normatively secured contexts of interaction by communicatively achieved ones. The centrality of this element is evident when we consider that this process occurs simultaneously on two fronts. First, in the struggles of social movements with the state and official economic system institutions; these struggles are not waged over systems media alone—they are also waged over the meanings and norms embedded and enacted in government and corporate policy. Second, this process occurs in a phenomenon not thematized by Habermas: in the struggles between opposing social movements with conflicting interpretations of social needs. Both kinds of struggles involve confrontations between normatively secured and communicatively achieved action. Both involve contestation for hegemony over the sociocultural “means of interpretation and communication.” For example, in many late capitalist societies, women’s contradictory, self — dividing experience of trying to be both workers and mothers, clients and citizens, has given rise to not one but two women’s movements, a feminist one and an antifeminist one. These movements, along with their respective allies, are engaged in struggles with one another and with state and corporate institutions over the social meanings of “woman” and “man,” “femininity” and “masculinity”; over the interpretation of women’s needs; over the interpretation and social construction of women’s bodies; and over the gender norms that shape the major institution-mediating social roles. Of course, the means of interpretation and communication in terms of which the social meanings of these things are elaborated have always been controlled by men. Thus, feminist women are struggling in effect to redistribute and democratize access to, and control over, discursive resources. We are, therefore, struggling for women’s autonomy in the following special sense: a measure of collective control over the means of interpretation and communication sufficient to permit us to participate on a par with men in all types of social interaction, including political deliberation and decision-making.47
The foregoing suggests that a caution is in order concerning the use of the terms “particularism” and “universalism.” Recall that Habermas’s sixth thesis emphasized feminism’s links to historic liberation movements and its roots in universalist morality. Recall that he was critical of those tendencies within feminism, and in resistance movements in general, which try to resolve the identity problematic by recourse to particularism, that is, by retreating from arenas of political struggle into alternative communities delimited on the basis of natural categories like biological sex. I want to suggest that there are really three issues here and that they need to be disengaged from one another. One is the issue of political engagement versus apolitical countercultural activity. Insofar as Habermas’s point is a criticism of cultural feminism, it is well-taken in principle, but it needs to be qualified by two perceptions: cultural separatism, although inadequate as longterm political strategy, is in many cases a shorter-term necessity for women’s physical, psychological, and moral survival; and separatist communities have, in fact, been the source of numerous reinterpretations of women’s experience which have proved politically fruitful in contestation over the means of interpretation and communication. The second issue is the status of women’s biology in the elaboration of new social identities. Insofar as Habermas’s point is a criticism of reductive biologism, it is well — taken. But this does not mean that one can ignore the fact that women’s biology has nearly always been interpreted by men; nor that women’s struggle for autonomy necessarily and properly involves, among other things, the reinterpretation of the social meanings of our bodies. The third issue is the difficult and complex one of universalism versus particularism. Insofar as Habermas’s endorsement of universalism pertains to the metalevel of access to, and control over, the means of interpretation and communication, it is well-taken. At this level, women’s struggle for autonomy can be understood in terms of a universalist conception of distributive justice. But it does not follow that the substantive content which is the fruit of this struggle—namely, the new social meanings we give our needs and our bodies, our new social identities and conceptions of femininity—can be dismissed as particularistic lapses from universalism. For these are no more particular than the sexist and androcentric meanings and norms they are meant to replace. More generally, at the level of substantive content, as opposed to dialogical form, the contrast between universalism and particularism is out of place. Substantive social meanings and norms are always necessarily culturally and historically specific; they always express distinctive shared but nonuniversal forms of life. Feminist meanings and norms will be no exception—but they will not, on that account, be particularistic in any pejorative sense. Let us simply say that they will be different.
I have been arguing that struggles of social movements over the means of interpretation and communication are central to an emancipatory resolution of crisis tendencies in welfare state capitalism. Let me now clarify their relation to institutional change. Such struggles, I claim, are implicitly and explicitly raising a number of important of questions: Should the roles of worker, childrearer, citizen, and client be fully degendered? Can they be? Or do we, rather, require arrangements that permit women to be workers and citizens as women, just as men have always been workers and citizens as men? And what might that mean? In any case, does not an emancipatory outcome require a profound transformation of the current gender roles at the base of contemporary social organization? And does not this, in turn, require a fundamental transformation of the content, character, boundaries, and relations of the spheres of life which these roles mediate? How should the character and position of paid work, childrearing, and citizenship be defined vis-a-vis one another? Should democratic-socialist-feminist, self-managed, paid work encompass childrearing? Or should childrearing replace soldiering as a component of transformed, democratic-socialist-feminist, participatory citizenship? What other possibilities are conceivable?
Let me conclude this discussion of the six theses by restating the most important critical points. First, Habermas’s account fails to theorize the patriarchal, norm-mediated character of late-capitalist official-economic and administrative systems. Likewise, it fails to theorize the systemic, money — and power-mediated character of male dominance in the domestic sphere of the late-capitalist lifeworld. Consequently, his colonization thesis fails to grasp that the channels of influence between system and lifeworld institutions are multidirectional. And it tends to replicate, rather than to problematize, a major institutional support of women’s subordination in late capitalism—namely the gender-based separation of both the masculine public sphere and the state-regulated economy of sex-segmented paid work and social-welfare, from privatized female childrearing. Thus, although Habermas wants to be critical of male dominance, his diagnostic categories deflect attention elsewhere, to the allegedly overriding problem of gender — neutral reification. Consequently, his programmatic conception of decolonization bypasses key feminist questions; it fails to address the issue of how to restructure the relation of childrearing to paid work and citizenship. Finally, Habermas’s categories tend to misrepresent the causes and underestimate the scope of the feminist challenge to welfare state capitalism. In short, the struggles and wishes of contemporary women are not adequately clarified by a theory that draws the basic battle line between system and lifeworld institutions. From a feminist perspective, there is a more basic battle line between the forms of male dominance linking “system” to “life — world” and us.