2023-04-27 13:00:05
When underage workers become protest voters
Calls for a mandatory year for everyone: Axel Honneth
Source: Jürgen Bauer/ullstein picture
The social philosopher Axel Honneth thinks about democracy in companies. According to his thesis, those who decide nothing there will quickly become political protest voters. Sounds like the old Federal Republic. What applies today?
LAxel Honneth cautiously approaches his subject in “The Working Sovereign”. The famous social philosopher needs 400 pages and hundreds of detailed footnotes for his book, which boils down to the following thesis: the working population has always been forgotten in modern democracy. Like his academic teacher Jürgen Habermas, Honneth takes up the philosophical canon only to let it take its place again with bad grades. “As much as one likes to imagine that the citizens are primarily concerned with actively participating in political debates, the social reality is different,” writes Honneth.
Honneth’s book is a contribution to the question of where the notorious disenchantment with democracy or politics comes from. In almost every election, fewer and fewer people exercise their right to determine who holds public office, if they have that right at all. Why is it? Distrust of the aloof political class? Do you doubt that the elected representatives can still change something fundamental? Or is there the impression that politics is only made for the few, not for the many?
Honneth comes to a different conclusion: Because most people have to work, they don’t have the time to deal with politics. And because they work under conditions in which neither democratic decision-making nor collective decisions play a role, they are untrained in democracy. From personal experience, the democratic form of government is about as remote from the cleaning lady or the delivery service driver as the needs of ordinary people are from the average politician. One is inwardly and outwardly uninvolved, at best one resorts to the means of protest elections.
Honneth – like a union man
At the same time, Honneth occasionally sounds like the union uncle, who talks about the past with late 1968 nostalgia: “In no phase since the end of the Second World War have working conditions been accepted without any publicly visible resistance as they are today – although things are much worse for them than it was fifty, sixty years ago, when collective protest and resistance were the order of the day.” With the recent major strikes, some workers seem to have set out to refute Honneth on this point.
The better the working conditions – fairer, more participatory, more transparent – the more likely it is that the “working sovereign” will be encouraged to engage in civic engagement, this is how Honneth’s plea could be summed up. It sounds, you have to admit, like the Federal Republic of the 1970s, like social partnership and strong trade unions, like a mustache, a whistle, corduroy suits, like “internal democracy” and Günter Grass. It’s the “old school”, but at least they know that table football and fruit baskets in the start-up club lift the spirits, but cannot replace social security.
Modern societies are held together by work, Honneth knows, this is where democracy has to prove itself. What the former head of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, who now teaches at New York’s Columbia University, sharply rejects, are both identity politics and an unconditional basic income. For Honneth, they distract from the need to make improvements for working people. While he does not call for a “right to work,” Honneth advocates compulsory service for a year or two as another measure to exercise democracy.
In his efforts to philosophically and practically prepare the “working sovereign” for democracy again, Honneth fails to notice that this democracy is currently being badly affected and in crisis. Whether it’s a state of emergency or reform of the electoral law, it’s the elected representatives themselves who sometimes seem to get bored with democracy, while the youngsters glued to the streets are already fantasizing about the “climate lockdown”. So Honneth’s attempt to bring working people onto the stage of political philosophy gets stuck halfway and even becomes somewhat uncomfortably paternalistic.
Axel Honneth: The working sovereign. A normative theory of work. Suhrkamp, 400 pages, 30 euros
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