Habermas' Concept Of Labor And Its Criticism

Habermas'theory of communication is Frankfort School critical theory's new development, which has a significant influence on Modern Western Marxism Philosophy. While the theory's important basis, lies in Habermas'analysis and understanding towards Hegel's labor and Marx labor's improvement. He studied the two people's labor, therefore, got another labor which is different from Marxs'. But many researches from domestic and abroad put emphasis on Hegel and Marx's labor, they studied little as to Habermas own labor.Hegel made labor become a question of philosophy, Marx's main concern was labor for all his life, while Habermas'labor has some connections with them. Take all into consideration, we'll conduct comparison and analysis towards three people's labor to promote our understanding of Habermas'labor. Through analysis, we criticized his labor and thought he weakened human's importance. But criticism is not our purpose, our main concern is to find how many reasonable elements he absorbed and misunderstood, then how he succeeded in mixing them together and became his own concept. Habermas'study contributed us to further critically understanding his theory of communication. Furthermore, our another goal is to further understand Marx's labor, practice and communication through criticize Habermas'labor. There are four parts in this article.PartⅠintroduce the reason for Habermas reconstruction of Hegel's labor and we explain Hegel's labor briefly, Habermas point out some reasonable aspects of Hegel's labor, but he misunderstood it in some degree.PartⅡexpound his understanding and analysis of Marx's labor and we'll analyze which aspect he agreed and disagreed with Marx from three points: his agreement with Marx's labor, his attitude towards Historical Materialism, his criticism of Marx's labor.PartⅢHabermas misunderstood Marx's labor, we'll analyze it from three points: why he criticize Marx's labor, his mixture of Marx's labor and practice, his misunderstanding of which Marx made labor aesthetically. We'll point out his motive and his misunderstood towards Marx's labor and reasonable aspects. The last part, through Habermas's analysis towards Marx's labor, we can see he misunderstood Marx's practice, we'll analyze his own labor in order to assess his labor concept reasonably.