Following a workshop on ‘Wildening the public sphere’ with Nancy Fraser at the Berlin Centre for Social Critique in June 2022, we had the chance to continue the discussion via Zoom in November 2022. We start by illuminating the relation between ‘subaltern counterpublics’ and the public-at-large, the rise of right-wing counterpublics and the impact of so-called ‘social media’ on the public sphere. That brings us to the question how publics are situated within capitalism, and how they are able to politicize (...) issues that are traditionally considered private in capitalist societies. This is particularly interesting in regard to the pressing political task of forming an extended and non-essentialist working class identity that is able to mediate different ‘faces of labour’, as Fraser puts it in her recent Benjamin Lecture (2022a). (shrink)

In this contribution, we argue that critical theories of the public sphere (in Habermas, but also in Negt and Kluge as well as Fraser) leave out the socially central field of labour and labour-political disputes, and that a reactualization and refocusing becomes necessary: We define the dynamics of globalization, commodification and digitalization as sequences of a renewed structural transformation of both social self-understanding and gainful employment. With the help of a multi-level model of labour-political publics and counter-publics, class mobilizations can (...) be examined with a public-theoretical lens and important moments of labour-political disputes can also be reflected on their communicative conditions. This is exemplified by two vignettes. (shrink)