Marx’s counter-model grounded autonomy in the public sphere rather than private property

Evidence

From the dialectic immanent in the bourgeois public sphere Marx derived the socialist consequences of a counter-model in which the classical relationship between the public sphere and the private was peculiarly reversed. In this counter-model, criticism and control by the public were extended to that portion of the private sphere of civil society which had been granted to private persons by virtue of their power of control over the means of productionto the domain of socially necessary labor. According to this new model, autonomy was no longer based on private property; it could in principle no longer be grounded in the private sphere but had to have its foundation in the public sphere itself. Private autonomy was a derivative of the original autonomy which alone constituted the public of a society’s citizens in the exercise of the functions of the socialistically expanded public sphere … The identity of bourgeois and homme, of property-owning private persons and human beings, was replaced by that of citoyen and homme; the freedom of the private person was a function of the role of human beings as citizens of society. No longer was the role of the citizen of a state the function of a human being’s freedom as property-owning private person, for the public sphere no longer linked a society of property-owning private persons with the state. Rather, the autonomous public, through the planned shaping of a state that became absorbed into society, secured for itself (as composed of private persons) a sphere of personal freedom, leisure, and freedom of movement. In this sphere, the informal and personal interaction of human beings with one another would have been emancipated for the first time from the constraints of social labor (ever a realm of necessity') and become really private’. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2369

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This inverts a deep Western assumption that freedom is secured in the private realm against the public; the claim that genuine privacy can only emerge once the public sphere governs social labor is a genuinely paradigm-shifting inversion worth sitting with.
• XREF: Directly parallels the Frankfurt School’s later Habermasian account and also resonates with the Marxian ‘realm of necessity vs realm of freedom’ distinction that Wiggershaus is tracing through the School’s theory. — connects to: Marx held that non-bourgeois strata could turn the bourgeois public sphere against its creators — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2367; Both liberal and socialist public-sphere models wrongly assumed the public can control the state — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2375
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does this counter-model square with the Frankfurt School’s own later suspicion of the fully socialized state as totalitarian, especially in Adorno and Horkheimer?