Kritische Gesellschaftstheorie und die Vielfalt der Emanzipationsperspektiven

Abstract

Social Movements have during the recent decades challenged the priority of the labour movement. Not only the liberation from wage labour is on the agenda of social movements and the left but also the overcoming of racism and sexism, equality of sexual orientations or the reconciliation of the social relation to nature. This is what Marx claimed when he spoke about the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved forsaken, despicable being. But the question arises as to how to bring these different perspectives together and whether the Marxian project of a critique of political economy is appropriate to its own claim or tends to reduce the whole of emancipation to only some limited goals. Demirovi? proposes making use of Marx’ conceptualisation of structure and superstructure and elaborating this distinction with further arguments from Althusser, Adorno and Gramsci in order to conceive of the superstructures as a strategic means of differentiating the bourgeois society as a complex whole of social relations.