Editing Jürgen Habermas (section)

===Socialist dialogue===
Habermas has sided with other 20th-century commentators on Marx such as [[Hannah Arendt]] who have indicated concerns with the limits of totalitarian perspectives often associated with Marx's over-estimation of the emancipatory potential of the forces of production. Arendt had presented this in her book ''[[The Origins of Totalitarianism]]'' and Habermas extends this critique in his writings on functional reductionism in the life-world in his ''[[The Theory of Communicative Action|Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason]]''. As Habermas states:

{{blockquote | ... traditional Marxist analysis&nbsp;... today, when we use the means of the critique of political economy&nbsp;... can no longer make clear predictions: for that, one would still have to assume the autonomy of a self-reproducing economic system. I do not believe in such an autonomy. Precisely for this reason, the laws governing the economic system are no longer identical to the ones Marx analyzed. Of course, this does not mean that it would be wrong to analyze the mechanism which drives the economic system; but in order for the orthodox version of such an analysis to be valid, the influence of the political system would have to be ignored.<ref name="Habermas, Jurgen 1981" />}}Habermas reiterated the positions that what refuted [[Karl Marx|Marx]] and his theory of [[Class conflict|class struggle]] was the "pacification of class conflict" by the [[welfare state]], which had developed in the West "since 1945", thanks to "a reformist relying on the instruments of [[Keynesian economics]]".<ref>{{Cite book|last=Habermas|first=Jürgen|title=Theory of Communicative Action|publisher=[[Beacon Press]]|year=1987|volume=2|pages=348|translator-last=Thomas|translator-first=McCarthy}}</ref><ref name=":0">{{Cite book|last=Losurdo|first=Domenico|title=Class Struggle|publisher=[[Palgrave Macmillan]]|year=2016|isbn=978-1-137-52387-7|pages=3|doi=10.1057/978-1-349-70660-0|s2cid=265035687 |lccn=2016940579}}</ref> Italian philosopher and historian [[Domenico Losurdo]] criticised the main point of these claims as "marked by the absence of a question that should be obvious:— Was the advent of the welfare state the inevitable result of a tendency inherent in [[capitalism]]? Or was it the result of political and social mobilization by the subaltern classes—in the final analysis, of a class struggle? Had the German philosopher posed this question, perhaps he would have avoided assuming the permanence of the welfare state, whose precariousness and progressive dismantlement are now obvious to everyone".<ref name=":0" />