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Die westliche Demokratie ist heute jeder kritischen Diskussion entzogen. Sie scheint das politische Ziel der Geschichte zu sein. Ihre Legitimität in Zweifel zu ziehen, ist mit einem Denkverbot belegt. Weshalb aber führen die westlichen Demokrarien Angriffskriege, sei es einst in Vietnam oder in Jugoslawien? Warum können sich die Wähler in diesen Demokratien meist nur zwischen zwei politischen Parteien, zwei Lagern, zwei Politik-Optionen entscheiden? Wieso werden unverhohlene Verächter der Humanität ebenso toleriert wie ihre Protagonisten? Herbert Marcuses Antwort ist ebenso einfach wie – zumindest heutzutage – unerhört: weil die westliche, bürgerliche Demokratie formal ist und nicht an materiale humanitäre Prinzipien gebunden. Diese Grundthese erlaubt es Marcuse, das Schicksal der bürgerlichen Demokratie zu thematisieren und nicht schon vor der Untersuchung zu deren Apologeten zu verkommen. Marcuses Haltung zur bürgerlichen Demokratie ist, bei aller Schärfe der Kritik, sehr differenziert. Da Regierungsformen, auch wenn sie zu bestimmten geschichtlichen Zeiten triumphieren, sich immerfort wandeln und endlich sind, gilt es, eine historisch bestimmte Einstellung zu gewinnen. er empfiehlt, die formale, bürgerliche Demokratie zu verteidigen, da sie die größte Freiheit zur Durchsetzung materialer Demokratie gewährt. Ob in seiner Kritik des Toleranzgebots oder der sadomasochistischen »Instinktgrundlage« bürgerlicher Demokratie, ob bei seinem Blick auf die junge westdeutsche Demokratie kurz nach dem 2. Weltkrieg oder auf die Entwicklung demokratischer Werte in der Studenten- und Menschenrechtsbewegung – immer führt Marcuse vor, wie zwischen den Errungenschaften und den humanitären Defiziten bürgerlicher Demokratie unterschieden werden muß. Ein Thema, das heute wieder von höchster Aktualität ist.

One of the defining characteristics of the empirical public sphere of the working class, both of the maximalist positions as of the communist and socialist democratic parties of Western Europe, consists in the fact that it views society as divided into two great camps. Such a division does indeed exist. It is in part called for by the ruling classes. What concerns us is not how this division can be overcome but to demonstrate that the

system. To everyday experience this yields a confusing picture, wherein the life-context is simultaneously integrated into production and the public sphere, and yet is at the same time excluded because in its concrete totality it is not recognized as an autonomous whole. 10. Marx says that, for the nineteenth-century proletariat, the abstraction of everything human, even of the semblance of the human, has in practice been achieved. The old and new public spheres of bourgeois society can respond only with palliatives; they provide, without any real change in the class situation, the semblance of humanity as a separate product. This is the foundation of the culture industry's pauperism [Pauperismus], which destroys experience.25 In the consciousness industry, but also in the public practice of aggrandizement and the ideological manufacture of the other production public spheres, the consciousness of the worker becomes the raw material and the site where these processes realize themselves. This does not alter the overall context of class struggles, but augments them with a higher, more opaque level. The position is fore it was possible after 1975, for example, to drive Volkswagen competition from American markets with the aid of safety regulations for automobile production. The most consistent exploitation of public norms is the so-called syndicate structure, which during the Third Reich represented the typical form of economic organization. Within this system the structuring of branches of industry adequate to the interests of the concern is accomplished by setting up statutory semistate institutions via which redistributions of economic wealth and attenuations of production and distribution take place. Organized on a private basis, such syndicates would come up against the ban on cartelsin statutory form they are perfectly feasible. An example of this is provided by the first piece of Federal legislation in the field of media policy, the so-called Film Subvention Law. In this case the legislative division of competence between federal and provincial levels was exploited by particular interests in the commercial cinema in such a way that the medium, which comprises cultural and economic dimensions, was to be subsidized in an abstract economic fashion, since federal legislation has competence only for the economic side of film. The result of this is the so-called "schmaltz-cartel" [Schnulzen-Kartell], a law which favors only certain films financed by concerns while bracketing out independent productions as merely "cultural." In the Film Subvention Bureau set up in the wake of the Film Subvention Law, representatives of parliament, the churches, and television work together with certain sectors of the film industry so that there arises a mixture of public and private power that is completely inscrutable. What is characteristic of this is the confusion of areas of responsibility: Bundestag deputies become, as presidents of this bureau, representatives of economic interests, thereby being subject to the legal monitoring of ministries which they themselves, as parliamentary deputies, control. Such constitutional nonsense would not have been possible in the classical public sphere; in supranational organizations above all, it becomes the norm. 25. See Jiirgen Habermas, "Die Dialektik der Rationalisierung. Vom Pauperismus in Produktion und Konsum," in Merkur, vol. VIII (1954), pp. 701ff. Reprinted in Arbeit, Erkenntnis, Fortschritt, Amsterdam, 1970, pp. 7ff. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.138 on Sun, 26 Jun 2016 07:16:09 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

The trouble with the current state of affairs in the Federal Republic does not stem from the difficulty in determining the sociological and socio-psychological causes of terrorism. It appears much more threatening to me that terrorism, and everything that can be associated with it, has assumed a nightmare quality in this society which breeds fear of contact and self-censorship. Most debates about terrorism are marked by the repression of real social contradictions and show such a high degree of unreality that one is led to believe the entire matter concerns only illusory problems. Even when it is a question of determinable techniques and brutal facts, everything bears the stamp of a ghostlike, inverted reality which often appears to be totally inexplicable when viewed from the sober perspective of a foreign observer. Each and every analysis of terrorism and its legitimatory function that discards the moralistic rhetoric and ritualized answers prevalent in the public sphere must proceed from a simple ascertainment of the facts. In Italy there is substantially more terrorism and violence carried on in public than in Germany but no one thinks of calling in the public executioner, suggesting incisive changes in the legal system, or even endowing the state with greater powers. John F. Kennedy, the former president of the United States, his brother Robert as presidential candidate, and Martin Luther King, the leader of the black liberation movement, were all murdered within a relatively short period of time but there was no return to McCarthyism and political persecution in the US, although mourning seized the entire nation. England has been suffused for years with assassinations and assassination attempts, but scarcely anyone believes that the main problem of English society is to be found here. Terrorism as strategy increasing tensions through horror, taking murderous revenge on single persons in leadership roles, forcing the public to pay attention to unresolved social and political problems, or blackmailing for the purpose of freeing prisoners such terrorism exists in other countries as well, but the motives and goals vary. What these countries have in common, however, is the manner and way in which they deal with terror and other acts of violence. They are obviously able to isolate terrorism as a special problem and in that way to preserve a measure of practical reason which in turn prevents individual social groups or parties from profiting and legitimating their power from the fear