filamentosmovimentos

" To use the expression "late capitalism" is to put forward the hypothesis that, even in state-regulated capitalism, social (?*) developments involve "contradictions" or crises.  

I shall therefore begin by elucidating the concept of crisis. Prior to its employment as a social-scientific term, the concept of crisis was familiar to us from its medical usage. In that context it refers to the phase of an illness in which it is decided whether or not the organism's self-healing powers are sufficient for recovery.

The critical process, the illness, appears as something objective. 

A contagious disease, for example, is contracted through external influences on the organism; and the deviations of the affected organism from its goal state [Sollzustand] —the normal, healthy state—can be observed and measured with the aid of empirical parameters. 

The patient's consciousness plays no role in this; how he feels, how he experiences his illness, is at most a symptom of a process that he himself can scarcely influence at all. 

Nevertheless, we would not speak of a crisis, when it is medically a question of life and death, if it were only a matter of an objective process viewed from the outside, if the patient were not also subjectively involved in this process. The crisis cannot be separated from the viewpoint of the one who is undergoing it —the patient experiences his powerlessness vis-ä-vis the objectivity of the illness only because he is a subject condemned to passivity and temporarily deprived of the possibility of being a subject in" full possession of his powers.

We therefore associate with crises the idea of an objective force

that deprives a subject of some part of his normal sovereignty.

(...)

The economic crisis is the first (and perhaps only) example in world history of a system crisis characterized in the following way: namely, that the dialectical contradiction between members of an interaction context comes to pass in terms of structurally insoluble system contradictions or steering problems. Through this displacement of conflicts of interest to the level of system steering, systems crises gain an objectivity rich in contrast: they have the appearance of inexplicable, contingent, natural catastrophes. 

Crises can arise at different points; and the forms in which a crisis tendency manifests itself up to the point of its political eruption —that is, the point at which the existing political 

system is delegitimized —are just as diverse. I see four possible crisis 

tendencies, which are listed in the following table:

The theorems on the motivation crisis I have discussed are based on 

two presuppositions. First, with Freud, Durkheim, and Mead, I 

start from the position that motivations are shaped through the 

internalization of symbolically represented structures of expectation."

Jürgen Habermas, 1973, in Legitimation Crisis

* ? by Catarina