Cracking economic abstractions: Bringing critical theory back-in
Rejecting naturalness: On society
The opposite term to a critical theory of society is not uncritical theory. It is traditional theory, at least according to Max Horkheimer who invoked the notion of a critical theory of society in his seminal essay ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ of 1937.1 If one were to summarize the difference between them, at its best traditional theory analyses the world of real (economic) abstractions to comprehend their political, economic, cultural, psychological, social and historical truth from various standpoints and comparative perspectives.2 Critical theory scrutinises their untruth. It asks about the social constitution of the (economic) abstractions, and it asks about the historically specific character of the social relations that assume the form of a relationship between seemingly natural economic things.
Critical theory thinks against the flow of the world, at least that is its intension. It does not deny that in the capitalist social relations the individuals are governed by the movement of real economic abstractions. Nor does it deny that their movement manifests itself as if by their own volition behind the backs of the acting subjects. Indeed, it accepts that in capitalist society the social individuals are governed by inescapable economic laws that assert themselves as if by the force of nature not just over but also through and by means of them. Its acceptance does not entail affirmation of the economic things. On the contrary, it brushes the (economic) categories against their grain to reveal their origin in the capitalistically organized social relations. It is critique of economic nature as a socially constituted nature. Critical theory is critical on the condition that it dissolves the dogmatic appearance of capitalist society as a natural economic thing. It amounts, as Alfred Sohn-Rethel put it, to an anamnesis of the social origin, or genesis, of real economic abstraction.3
Critical theory thus argues that although the social relations vanish in their economic appearance, the inhospitable world of the abstract economic forces remains a human world. In capitalist society the individuals are governed by the products of their own hand. That is, the social world manifests itself behind the backs of the individuals, and yet this manifestation, and their ‘enslavement’ to it, is their own work.4 It is not the work of some transhistorically conceived logic of the productive forces that move history forward from one mode of production to another, as the positivist Marxists, characterized by Adorno as ‘perverter[s] of Marxian motives’, believed it to be the case.5 For critical theory, historical materialism is not a theory of some abstractly conceived material logic of history. Rather, it is critique of the existing social relations in their form of appearance as relations of economic necessity. It is critique of society ‘understood as dogmatic’.6 The truth of society as a relationship of real economic abstractions is the untruth of the individuals as personification (Marx) or character-mask (Adorno) of their own social world.
For a traditional theory of society, the notion of socio-economic necessity is an affront. It smacks of economic determinism, excludes the ideas of contingency and construction, creation and culture, and suggests dogmatic reduction of society to economic effect. Yet, the traditional science of society is entirely founded on the presumption that labour economy is a natural phenomenon. As a natural phenomenon, society is identified by its structural properties, the study of which characterizes the domains of system theory. The idea of society as system leads to the introduction of the theory of social action to account for the behaviours and conflicts that characterize the subjective properties of human agency in the life-world.7 In traditional social theory society is seen either as a system of structural properties or as a world of social action, and the perennial question is therefore whether society as a system is dominant or whether society as a world of action is decisive. However, the idea that society exists twice, once as system and then as (acting) subject, does not really reproduce in thought the appearance of society as a split reality of structure and agency. The dualism of thought is more apparent than real. Given the choice between society as (economic) system and society as action, social theory unerringly sides with the mischief of society as a system. Although the independent movement of the economic forces cannot be comprehended as such, its effects can be analysed as instances of social contingency, which establish opportunity structures for the pursuit of distinct social projects at the expense of others. The so-called dialectics between structure and agency gives dialectics a bad name.8 It presumes what needs to be explained.
The notion that modernity is the civilized manifestation of an unfolding logic of, by themselves, unfathomable socio-economic forces and natural economic properties was articulated with lasting effect by Adam Smith, who viewed what he called ‘commercial society’ as the final manifestation of a natural human propensity to truck and barter that weaves its way through history on the back of a dynamic of constant increases in the productivity of labour, which leads to an ever greater social division of labour and the establishment of a commercial society of generalized exchange relations. The nature of commercial society is magic. It transforms private vices into public virtues just like that; that is, by means of an invisible hand.9 Natural economic laws are laws of natural necessity. Nature cannot be changed. It can however be destroyed. Natural laws need to be harnessed to avoid destruction and, therefore, in order to survive one has to adapt to them. The presupposition that labour is the productive means of social wealth in every society at any time shifts the focus of critical inquiry towards an argument about the most effective and just organization of labour economy.10 Instead of a critique of labour economy as an historically specific form of definite social relations, its social nature is naturalized. Capitalist society appears as natural since it manifests itself in the form of a movement of economic quantities, of price and profit, and this movement is not only entirely uncontrollable by the individuals who comprise society. It is, also, hostile to them. At the blink of an eye the economic movement of society can cut off a whole class of propertyless individuals, society’s surplus value producers, from access to the means of subsistence, just like that, indifferent to their needs and regardless of their efforts. Since nobody individually is in control, nobody individually can be blamed. Economic fate replaces the magic of religion within its own concept. In the form of economic fate, magic is disenchanted. It appears in the form of an invisible hand that ‘takes care of both the beggar and the king’.11 The invisible hand is the objective subject of reified society. It cows and feeds on the society from which it springs, demanding submission on the pain of ruin.
A critical theory of society does not reject as mere illusion the natural-invisible character capitalist society. The fetish character of capitalist society is real. However, and in contrast to traditional theory, it does not conceive of capitalist society as a manifestation of some transhistorically unfolding economic nature. The circumstance that Man has to eat does not in any way explain the form, content and force of the capitalist economic categories. History and society, not some presumed economic nature, nor the hunter and gatherers with whom Smith began his natural history towards what he calls commercial society, is the critical starting point of inquiry into capitalist economic nature, its power and force, logic and necessity, and consciousness and will. Conceived as a critical social theory, the critique of political economy rejects the ontological conception of economic things as deceitful. Instead, it argues that the supposition that the economic laws of capitalist labour economy are founded on a natural propensity, and are thus natural, is entirely theological in its grasp of capitalist society. The natural-invisible character of capitalist economy is in its entirety socially constituted and social constitution holds sway in and through its economic appearance as a force of nature that does nothing by itself. It is the acting subjects, who, as personifications of the economic categories, endow the logic of economic matter with a consciousness and a will. It is true, in capitalism, people live by the economic forces to make a living and, by doing so, they bestow them with an independent will, which appears in the form of society as a real economic abstraction. They do so without being aware of it. As a critical social theory, the task of the critique of political economy is to demystify the fetish character of the economic categories. It argues that the natural economic laws find their rational explanation through the understanding of definite forms of human social praxis. This practice not only vanishes in the form of its appearance. It also reappears in it as a practice of human personifications of their own social world.
There is only one world, and that is the world in which we live. To the point of death, therefore, the life of all Men hangs by the forces of capitalist economic nature. The idea that critical theory flouts traditional thinking entails thus more than it bargained for. It ‘flouts tradition’ only for as long as and to the extent that it retains consciousness of its own entanglement with the perverted world of economic inversion. It maintains this consciousness only for as long as it resists the comfort afforded by traditional theory. Traditional theory thinks about capitalist society as an object of analysis and economic calculation or as an object of normative judgement about its promise of freedom.12 In contrast, critical theory thinks in and through capitalist society to subvert its natural objectivity, at least that is its critical intension. In this society every individual is a coined individual – a living means and medium for the production of capitalist wealth that, on the pain of ruin, is accumulated for the sake of accumulation.13 Capital posits value for the sake of surplus value to make money yield more money, or it does not with ruinous consequence.14 Wealth appears in the form of money that ‘by virtue of being value . . . has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself’, laying ‘golden eggs’.15 The freedom of the individual is a capitalized freedom, which is the freedom of a coined individual. The satisfaction of needs is a mere sideshow. The traditional theory of an economic nature that is regulated by an invisible hand identifies the vanished human subject, and her needs, as a metaphysical distraction that gets in the way of the calculation of a movement of economic quantities. In the words of Joan Robinson’s despairing indictment of economic thought, ‘K is capital, ∆K is investment. Then what is K? Why, capital of course. It must mean something, so let us get on with the analysis, and do not bother about these officious prigs who ask us to say what it means.’16 Traditional thinking really is about things. In contrast, critical theory’s attempt to think in and through things seeks out the vanished subject at the moment of its disappearance. Marx’s notion of the critique of fetishism as an effort in deciphering the social constitution of economic things articulates the critical intent of his critique of political economy well: it is to ‘develop from the actual, given relations of life the forms in which they have become apotheosized’.17
Horkheimer’s conception of a critical theory of society, then, condemns as traditional a social theory that does not doubt the natural character of society, takes explanatory refuge in invisible principles and views the unfolding economic nature of society from different standpoints of analysis. From the standpoint of labour, it demands higher wages and better conditions, and rightly so; from the standpoint of capital, it demands enhanced labour productivity as a condition of global competitiveness, which is the condition for the sustained employment of labour; from the standpoint of the ecologist, it demands environmental protections; and from the standpoint of normative ideals of social justice, it demands re-distributive justice and equal opportunity. Then there is the view that capitalist economy manifests an irrational economy of labour and from this the thinking in normative orders derives the demand for a rationalized economy of labour that does not discriminate, exploit and dominate the workers. And the logic of the matter – who conceptualizes that? Traditional theory either presupposes what needs to be explained or explains what is already known, or it judges society on the basis of its own normative projections, and it does so without a concept of society.18 Critical theory thus rejects positivism and its philosophical equivalent of a science of knowledge, according to which the social facts speak for themselves, falsifying or verifying theoretical suppositions about their character. The economic fact that, say, loss of profitability imperils the prospects of sustained employment is an economic reality, and since Man can only know what is given in the factual experience of reality, nothing more can be gleaned from the facts, except that for the sake of sustained employment the profitable application of living labour is of the essence, on a world market scale.
The paradigmatic manifestation of the traditional theory is social mathematics. It sets out to rationalize yesterday’s movement of prices as a manifestation of a plurality of consumer-value preferences and, on the basis of this direct and immediate calculus, predicts tomorrow’s utility movements of economic quantities. That is, it aggregates yesterday’s economic behaviour to measure today’s deviation in order to predict tomorrow’s price movements, with winning intent – to gauge where to invest and what to sell. Quantities of ‘capital’ are translated into algebra, which expresses ‘utility movements’ of wealth in the form of abstract symbols. As an exact science of moving economic quantities, economics articulates society as unaware of itself in the form of calculable magnitudes of abstract wealth, of amounts of money that make more money, and it, society, lives the better the more money it yields. In its more critical manifestation, traditional theory thinks in terms of normative orders. In the face of poverty, it constructs a normative argument for a freedom from want without once asking whether poverty is really just a coincidence of capitalist wealth or whether it is in fact innate to its concept. The freedom of labour is the freedom of trade in labour power – and what, given the normative ideal of social justice, ought this trade have to be like to meet the norms of fairness and social justice? In the meantime, the sellers of labour power continue to struggle to make a living.
In conclusion, a traditional theory does not think in and through society. It thinks about society. The traditional refusal to think out of things has important consequences for anti-capitalist arguments about how the things ought to be (arranged). The following sections examine the elements of traditional anti-capitalism. I argue that it amounts at best to ticket thinking and, at worst, to a theological view. Contrary to the rumour about critical theory, its critique of existing conditions does not entail an impoverished praxis. Rather, it entails the question of praxis – what really does it mean to say ‘no’ in a society that is not only governed by the movement of economic abstractions but also dependent on them for its social reproduction?
As a critical social theory, the critique of political economy holds that economics is the formula of an inverted and bewitched world. This stance raises the question about the meaning of critique in the critique of political economy. What is criticized? According to Marx, his critique of political economy amounts to a ‘critique of economic categories’ to reveal their origin in the historically specific social relations of production. He thus argued that ‘the’ economists deal with un-reflected presuppositions.19 In their hands, the ‘law of capitalist accumulation [is] metamorphosed . . . into a pretended law of nature’.20 Time is money. Money is time. For the sake of wealth, that is money as more money, time is of the essence – there is no time to lose. Fundamentally, the profitable investment of capital is not an end in itself. Rather, it is a means of avoiding default and bankruptcy. ‘Fanatically intent’ on avoiding liquidation through ‘the valorization of value’, the capitalist, this personification of capital, a mere ‘cog’, recognizes ‘the proletarian’ as a ‘machine for the production of surplus value’.21 His ‘drive towards self-enrichment’ is the condition of preserving his capital, and he can only achieve this ‘by means of progressive accumulation’, accumulation for the sake of accumulation.22 Regarding the sellers of labour power, their struggle to make ends meet is dependent upon the successful consumption of their living labour for profit, which is the condition of future sales and therewith sustained access to the means of subsistence. The individuals act under the compulsion of the economic forces of time and money, and that is essentially more money in less time. Their freedom is the freedom of economic compulsion, which is the freedom of preserving capital by means of progressive accumulation, ‘ruthlessly [forcing] the human race to produce for production’s sake’;23 and it is the freedom of making ends meet on the part of the class of surplus value producers who struggle to dodge ‘the freedom to starve’.24 The class struggle belongs to the concept of capital.
Since the individuals act under the compulsion of abstract economic forces, the point of critique cannot therefore be to ‘make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them’.25 It is not sufficient to criticize capitalists for their seemingly excessive addiction to profit, nor is it sufficient to criticize bankers for pursuing money for the sake of more money. On the pain of ruin, these behaviours manifest the ‘objective necessity’ of capitalistically constituted social relations. Neither the capitalist nor the banker, nor indeed the worker, can extricate themselves from the reality in which they live and which asserts itself not only over them but also through them, and by means of them. The critique of the banker, or any other politico-economic operative of a system that asserts itself as an independent force over and through the social individuals, misses the object of critique. As a critical social theory, the critique of political economy is therefore not a critique of the personifications of economic categories. It does not argue that the labour economy is corrupted by the private interests of the capitalist and his political friends. It does not therefore demand political action to set things right, ostensibly in the interest of humanity and for the sake of a rationalized labour economy. Instead, it is a critique of the capitalistically organized social relations of human reproduction that assume the form of a movement of economic things, which objectify themselves in the person to the vanishing point of death.
Nevertheless, while every individual is ‘ruled by abstractions’, the owners of great wealth experience this rule as a source of great enrichment and power. In this context, Horkheimer and Adorno have argued that the ‘rulers’ are safe for as long as the ‘ruled’ struggle under the spell of the inverted world, in which, say, the cause of financial crisis, economic downturn, loss of employment and wage income are attributed to the greedy behaviour of identifiable individuals.26 A spellbound critique of capitalism demands more of this and less of that. It apportions blame and proclaims to know ‘how to set things right’. It identifies the wrong-doer and personalizes what is wrong. Rather than capital, it is the profit-making consciousness of the capitalist and the greed of the speculator that is criticized, rejected and condemned. That is, the critique of the capitalist manifests itself as a demand for a better capitalism, one that works in the interests of the ‘workers’, or in today parlance, the ‘many’. Marx’s critique of Proudhon focused on this simple point. Proudhon substituted the critique of capitalism for a critique of the capitalist, seeking to free capital from the capitalist so as to utilize the power of capital for the benefit of a well-ordered society, investing in society and creating employment opportunities for the class of surplus value producers.
The critique of the capitalist leaves the category of capital not only entirely untouched by thought. It also elevates ‘capital’ as a thing beyond critique. Capital thus appears to be no more than an economic mechanism that can be made to work for this class interest or that class interest – in the end, it is the balance of the class forces that decides for which interest capital functions! Rather than touching the category of capital by thought, it identifies the guilty party, condemns it and demands state action to sort things out and to set things right. It thus attributes miserable social conditions to the activity of some identifiable individuals, who no longer appear as personifications of economic categories but, rather, as the personalized subject of misery. This personalization of the economic categories entails a number of differentiations, most importantly between the productive or indeed creative capitalist as a ‘producer’ of ‘real’ wealth employing a hard-working and creative people, and the financial or indeed parasitic capitalist who makes his fortune by speculating in money to the detriment of industry and workers. Here the distinction between a use-value production, on the one hand, and exchange value that manifests itself in the form of money, on the other, appears in the forms of distinct personalities – pitting the creative industrialist against the parasitic banker-cum-speculator. There emerges, then, the idea of a capitalism that is corrupted by the financial interests. Finance turns capitalism into a casino at the expense of national industry, national wealth, national workers and national harmony.
The critique of financial imperialism entails the idea of anti-imperialism as a progressive, liberating force. The reverse of anti-imperialism is national liberation, by which the dominated communities defend themselves against the disintegrating forces of financial globalization and imperial power. The idea of the nation as a subject of liberation is as irrational as the belief in a national destiny and a national homogeneity of purposes, from a national industry via the national interest to a national history. The idea of the nation as the foundation of being and becoming recognizes the term ‘cosmopolitanism’ as a term of abuse. In its stead, it idolizes the ‘spirit of the people’ as the imagined foundation of national being and becoming.27 If indeed it is permissible at all to speak about the national spirit of the people, it is a national spirit not by nature, but by a history of class struggle. By reducing history to nature or by reading nature into history, the struggle for national liberation becomes delusional inasmuch as a people are forced to act ‘as if’ they really are natural forces that have a national history. That is, a definite form of society manifests itself in the form of a movement of coins and then, under the spell of this coined movement, rebels against the personifications of a world governed by coins. The personalized critique of capital identifies the ‘wrongdoer’ of the wronged society and calls him a merchant of greed. For the sake of employment and industry, something needs to be done. Something can be done! The personalized critique of capitalist social relations is open to abuse from the outset. It thinks akin to a register of blame and condemns the identified party as a power that hides behind the economic phenomena, sucking the living life out of the national community of a hard-working people. This identification of the subject of misery leads to the condemnation of the world market society of capital as a network of money and power that for the sake of financial gain destroys the livelihood of a national people, victims of cosmopolitan peddlers.28
Society as object
The headlines of misery have changed from war and terror to what seems like a never-ending global economic crisis, pre- and post-pandemic – yet war and terror continue unabated. In this context, the notion that capitalism produces deplorable situations is a most optimistic point of view. Deplorable situations (Mißstände) are not the same as deplorable conditions (Zustände). The latter says that poverty is a capitalist condition. Challenging it requires a fundamental change in the social relations of production. In distinction, deplorable situations describe entirely avoidable socio-economic circumstances, be they the result of chance developments, government incompetence, pandemics or hard-nosed class-politics. As such, it can be rectified by well-meaning political interventions and political programmes that benefit society at large. Miserable situations require resolution by political means that hold the economy accountable to the democratic demands of the social majority. Deplorable situations require thus a socio-political activism that challenges This misery and That outrage, seeking to alleviate This inequality and That injustice and to rectify This and That. Critical theory looks beyond the contingent to grasp capitalism’s fundamental condition. The activism of the given situation feels the pain of the world, and it might succeed in making capitalist society more equal, inclusive, fair and just. Nevertheless, the ‘activism’ of the deplorable situation is not only affirmative of existing society. It is also delusional about the character of fairness, justice and equality in capitalism. It is based on the conviction that however bad the situation, it can be rectified for good by this intervention or that policy, by this or that technical means, by this welfare support or that public policy, for the sake of fairness, justice and freedom, the end of suffering and misery, and the overcoming of exploitation, discrimination and inequality. It seeks a capitalism that works in the image of its normative ideal, without a question raised about what lays within it. In this manner, the activism of the situation transforms the protest against a really existing misery that blights the life of a whole class of individuals into a selling point for political gain.
There is, says Adorno, a need for a ‘practice that fights barbarism’.29 Barbarism cannot be fought in a direct and immediate manner – what really does it mean to struggle against money, resist the movement of coins, combat the law of economic value, resist the coined freedom of capitalist profit and fight poverty in a system of social reproduction that contains the pauper in its conception of its wealth.30 To put this point differently: The humanization of social relations is the purpose and end of the struggle for human emancipation from relations in which Man is a degraded being governed by real economic abstractions. Should the effort at humanizing capitalist society’s treatment of its workers succeed, the better for the poor and miserable. Humanized profit making is much preferable to the slaveholder’s whip and worse. Humanizing capitalism prevents it from descending into social catastrophe with ease. Its efforts sustain the precarious crust of civility in bourgeoise society. Adorno’s revision of Kant’s categorical imperative, according to which one should recognize and treat Man never as a means but always as a purpose, is apt: ‘Hitler has imposed a new categorical imperative upon humanity in the state of their unfreedom: to arrange their thinking and conduct, so that Auschwitz never repeats itself, so that nothing similar ever happen again.’31 The effort at humanizing fetters the state of unfreedom with golden chains. However, the effort of humanization presupposes inhuman conditions, and it is thus confronted by the paradox that it presupposes as eternal those same conditions that provoke the effort of humanization in the first place. Inhuman conditions are not just an impediment to humanization but a part and parcel of the concept of humanization. What then does it mean to say ‘no’? It is easy to say what is wrong. It is however quite impossible to say what is right in the negative totality of capitalist society.32
Adorno captures the difficulty of saying ‘no’ well when he argues that the ‘total movement of society’ is ‘antagonistic from the outset’.33 That is to say, ‘society stays alive, not despite its antagonism, but by means of it’.34 Contrary to traditional Marxism, class struggle is not something positive. Rather, it belongs to and characterizes the negative world, and drives it forward. Class struggle for access to the means of life does not express an ontologically privileged position, according to which the working class is the driving force of historical progress.35 Rather, to be a productive worker ‘is a great misfortune’.36 That is to say, class is not a positive category. It is a negative category. Class is a category of the false society, one that posits a mass of dispossessed labourers as producers of surplus value and one that concentrates the means of life as means of profit at the disposal of a few hands. The critique of class society does not find its positive resolution in the achievement of fair and just exchange relations between the buyers of labour power and the producers of surplus value. The critique of class society finds its positive resolution only in a society in which the progress of ‘the muck of ages’ has come to an end, in the classless society.37
A constructive critique of class society, one that wants to do good for the surplus value producers, is entirely traditional in its account of society. It posits the observable fact of class division, classifies the individuals according to their observed market positions and occupations, takes into account income levels and educational achievements, and calculates with predictive intent the probabilities of conflict and acquiescence. It posits class and affirms what is posited. In its practical dimension, it amounts, argue Horkheimer and Adorno, to ‘ticket thinking’.38 Such thinking is one-dimensional. It rejects the critique of class society by speaking out for the working class, with a claim to power. That is, it demands a shift in the balance of class forces to set things right ostensibly on behalf of the class tied to work, seeking a better deal for the wage-slaves. Ticket thinking proclaims falseness. It does ‘not talk about the devil’.39
By putting forth a programme of social transformation without thought about the conceptuality of capitalist wealth, ticket thinking ‘looks on the bright side’ and proclaims falseness.40 Its falsehood is not untrue. It identifies the existing conditions of misery and makes it seem as if they present a mere pathology of capitalist wealth. This stance articulates an objective illusion. It supposes that all would be well if only government were to stand up to the capitalist interests and their imperialist backers. The illusion says that the profitable accumulation of money that yields more money does not really count; what counts is the satisfaction of human needs. It says that the failure to make a profit entails no threat to social reproduction; what counts is not profit but human beings. It suggests that the life of the class tied to work does not hang by the success of turning her labour into profit as the fundamental condition of achieving wage-based access to the means of life; what counts is goodness. It says that debt is not a mortgage on future surplus value; what counts is consumption. It rejects as absurd that useful things that cannot be turned into profits are burned; what counts is use-value production. It rejects as unfounded the insight that in the capitalistically organized social relations, ‘the needs of human beings, the satisfaction of human beings, is never more than a sideshow’.41 It opposes money as capital, M . . . M’. Instead, it considers money as means of purchasing commodities (C . . . M . . . C) and demands that money be put into the pockets of workers to strengthen their purchasing power, connecting them more firmly to the means of subsistence. The exchange of labour power (C) for money (M) that is then exchanged for means of subsistence (C), C . . . M . . . C, is, however, a function of M . . . C . . . M’. Profitable employers purchase labour power. Unprofitable employers do not. Profit-making is the means of avoiding bankruptcy and for the sake of sustained access to the means of subsistence, the sellers of labour power depend on the profitable exploitation of their labour by ‘moneybags’. The illusion of the epoch suggests that profits do not matter. What matters is the well-being of workers. The illusion of the epoch confuses the reality of capitalism with its (illusionary) promise of a freedom from want.
The illusion of the epoch identifies what really counts, and yet it leaves the economic categories untouched by thought. It does not recognize the very society that it rejects, abstractly. Only a reified consciousness can declare that it is in possession of the requisite knowledge, political capacity, and technical expertise and know-how not only for resolving capitalist crises but, also, to do so in the interests of the class that works. For the sake of progress, it demands a rationalized labour economy, equitable exchange relations and fair working conditions. ‘Abstract negativity’ barks in perpetuity and without bite.42 Instead, it sniffs out the miserable world, from the outside as it were, and puts itself forward as having the capacity, ability, insight and means for organizing capitalist economy for the workers, securing the full-employment of the class that lives by labour. Abstract negativity describes the theology of anti-capitalism. Theologically conceived, anti-capitalism is devoid of Now-Time. Instead, it views the present as transition towards its own future, promising deliverance from misery amidst ‘a pile of debris’ that ‘grows skyward’.43
Postscript: Society as struggle
For a critical theory of society, the critical concept of enquiry is not hegemony. It is governmentality. Each individual carries her bond with society in her wallet. Everybody lives for money. For the sake of making a living, she needs to make money. Money does not only make the world go around; its possession also establishes a connection to the means of life. As such, the class struggle is a struggle for money – it governs the mentality of bourgeois society, from the struggle for employment, over wages and conditions, and against redundancy. What a misery? In the face of great social wealth, the propertyless sellers of labour power struggle for fleeting amounts of money to sustain themselves as producers of surplus value. There is a fate far worse than being an exploited worker; and that is to be an unexploitable worker. For the sake of making a living, what is the price of a kidney?
Especially in miserable times, it is important to understand that the struggle for the society of human purposes does not follow some abstract idea. It is a struggle for access to ‘crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist’.44 What then are the dispossessed surplus value producers struggling for? ‘In-itself’ they struggle for access to the means of subsistence to satisfy their human needs. They struggle for wages and conditions, and they struggle to defend wage levels and conditions. They struggle against capital’s ‘were-wolf’s hunger for surplus labour’ and its destructive conquest for additional atoms of unpaid labour time, and thus against the reduction of their life to a mere time’s carcase. They struggle against a life constituting solely of labour-time and thus against a reduction of human life to a living resource. They struggle for respect, education and recognition of human significance, and above all for food, shelter, clothing, warmth, love, affection, knowledge, time for enjoyment and dignity. Their struggle as a class ‘in-itself’ really is a struggle ‘for-itself’: for life, human distinction, life-time and, above all, satisfaction of basic human needs. The working class does not struggle for socialism. It struggles to make a living. It struggles for access to the means of life and for comfort. It does all of this in conditions, in which the increase in material wealth that it has produced pushes beyond the limits of its capitalist form of wealth, money that yields more money for the sake of more money. Every so-called trickle-down effect that capitalist accumulation might bring forth presupposes a prior and sustained trickle up in the capitalist accumulation of wealth. And then society ‘suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence’.45 The struggle of the dispossessed does not express an ontological privilege. It is ‘dictated by hunger’.46
The existence of the social individuals as personifications of seemingly self-moving economic forces does not entail the reduction of social consciousness to economic consciousness. It entails the concept of economy as an experienced concept of struggle to overcome misery, and economic consciousness as an experienced consciousness of suffering. For the propertyless sellers of labour power, economic consciousness is an unhappy consciousness. This is the unhappy consciousness of the struggle for access to the means of life. It is this struggle that makes the oppressed class the depository of historical knowledge. Instead of thinking about history, one needs instead to think out of history, out of the battles for freedom, slave insurrections, peasant revolts, the struggles of Les Enragés, working-class strikes, riots, insurrections and revolutions, to appreciate the traditions of the oppressed, recognize the smell of danger and the stench of death, gain a sense of the courage and cunning of struggle, grasp the spirit of sacrifice and comprehend, however fleetingly, the density of a time at which the progress of the muck of ages almost came to a standstill. Class struggle ‘supplies a unique experience with the past’.47 Whether this experience ‘turns concrete in the changing forms of repression as resistance to repression or whether it turns concrete in forms of repression’, is a matter of experienced history.48 A definite logic holds sway in real economic abstraction. Its secret history is the sheer unrest of life.
Notes
Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at the Critical Theory Conference in Rome in May 2014, read as the Keynote address to the Fellowship conference of The Independent Social Research Foundation, held at the University of York in May 2014, discussed at the Manchester CSE Trans-Pennine Workshop in July 2014 and at the workshop Retours a Marx, held at the University Paris Nanterre in March 2015, and subsequently published as Bringing Critical theory Back-in at a Time of Misery, Capital & Class, 40, no. 2, 233–344. This chapter is a substantially revised and updated version of that earlier publication.
1 Max Horkheimer, ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, in Critical Theory Selected Essays (London: Continuum, 2002), 188–243.
2 According to Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Warenform und Denkform (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978), who first advanced the notion of real abstraction, real abstraction amounts to a concrete process. In Adorno’s terminology, the objective conceptuality of society comprises a real abstraction of seemingly self-moving economic categories that, although socially constituted in their entirety, impose themselves on the acting subject as if by force of nature. On this see Helmut Reichelt, ‘Social Reality as Appearance: Some Notes on Marx’s Conception of Reality’, in Human Dignity: Social Autonomy and the Critique of Capitalism, edited by Werner Bonefeld and Kosmas Psychopedis (London: Routledge, 2017), 31–67. On the Adorno’s debt to Sohn-Rethel, see Helmut Reichelt, ‘Die Marxsche Kritik ökonomischer Kategorien. Überlegungen zum Problem der Geltung in der dialektischen Darstellungmethode im ‘Kapital’, in Emanzipation als Versöhnung: zu Adornos Kritik der Warentausch-Gesellschaft und Perspektiven der Transformation, edited by Iring Fetscher and Alfred Schmidt (Frankfurt: Verlag Neue Kritik, 2002), 142–90, here 181, fn.5. On real abstraction as a category of a critical social theory, see Frank Engster and Oliver Schlaudt, ‘Alfred Sohn-Rethel: Real Abstraction and the Unity of Commodity-Form and Thought Form’, in The Sage Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, edited by Beverley Best, Werner Bonefeld and Chris O’Kane (London: Sage, 2018), 284–301.
3 The German original says: ‘Historischer Materialismus ist Anamnesis der Genese’. Sohn-Rethel, Warenform und Denkform, 139.
4 See Horkheimer, ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, 229.
5 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, translated by E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1990), 335. One of the more eloquent contemporary representatives of dialectical materialism is Terry Eagleton, Why Marx was Right (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). For a seminal critique of historical materialism dogmatically conceived, see Richard Gunn, ‘Against Historical Materialism’, in Open Marxism, vol. 1, edited by Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn and Kosmas Psychopedis (London: Pluto Press, 1992), 1–45; and Simon Clarke, ‘Althusserian Marxism’, in One Dimensional Marxism, edited by Simon Clarke, Terry Lovell, Kevin McDonnel, Kevin Robins and Victor Jeleniewski Seidler (London: Allison & Busby, 1980), 7–102.
6 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 196.
7 On system and life world in Habermas’s social theory see, Helmut Reichelt, ‘Jürgen Habermas’ Reconstruction of Historical Materialism’, translated by William Martin and Joseph Fracchia, in The Politics of Change, edited by Werner Bonefeld and Kosmas Psychopedis (London: Palgrave, 2000), 105–47.
8 On the dialectic of structure and agency, see Werner Bonefeld, ‘Crisis of Theory’, Capital & Class 17, no. 2 (1993): 25–47.
9 On Smith’s concept of labour economy, see Simon Clarke’s Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology (London: Palgrave, 1992).
10 Apart from adapting to the demands of capitalist labour economy, one might also hope to achieve a more rational organization of labour economy, progressing the economy of labour from its supposedly irrational manifestation in capitalism to its rationalization by means of public authority in socialism. See David Harvey, ‘History versus Theory: A Commentary of Marx’s Method in Capital’, Historical Materialism 20, no. 2 (2012): 3–38. Although entirely traditional in its conception, Harvey’s understanding of labour economy as an enduring necessity of social wealth is widely shared, including contemporary versions of critical theory, which after decades of neglect rediscovered the economy as a discursive reality since 2008. See, for example, the conversation about between Nancy Frazer and Rahel Jaeggi, Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 2018). Like Harvey, they argue for the rational organization of labour economy by means of state and for the sake of reason. For a critique of the contemporary linkage between (Habermasian) critical theory and Marxism economics, see Chris O’Kane, ‘Society Maintains Itself Despite All the Catastrophes that May Eventuate: Critical Theory, Negative Totality, and Crisis’, Constellations 25, no. 2 (2018): 287–301. See Moishe Postone, Time, Labour, and Social Domination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) for a seminal a critique of Marxian economics as a contradiction in terms. For Postone the critique of political economy does not amount to an argument for a better labour economy. Fundamentally it amounts a critique of labour economy.
11 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 251. See also Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, translated by Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 280.
12 On liberal egalitarianism and contemporary normative social theory, see Tony Smith, Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism: Marx and Normative Social Theory in the Twenty-First Century (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018).
13 It is, however, the case that not every individual is either a means or a medium of capitalist wealth. Some are neither. Keynes called them the involuntarily unemployed. Dimitra Kotouza, Surplus Citizens (London: Pluto, 2019) is less forgiving in her terminology.
14 Although critical theory conceives of capitalist society as a real abstraction, its conceptualization of money as the form of value has developed only since the 1970s. See the pioneering contribution by Hans-Georg Backhaus, ‘Materialien zur Rekonstruktion der Marxschen Werttheorie 2’, in Gesellschaft. Beiträge zur Marxschen Theorie 3 (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), 122–59. For more recent contributions see Chris Arthur, ‘Value and Money’, in Marx’s Theory of Money, edited by Fred Moseley (London: Palgrave, 2005), 111–23; Martha Campbell, ‘The Objectivity of Value versus the Idea of Habitual Action’, in The Constitution of Capital: Essays on Volume I of Marx’s Capital, edited by Riccardo Bellofiore and Nicola Taylor (London: Palgrave, 2004), 63–87; Christian Lotz, The Capitalist Schema (London: Lexington Books, 2014); Werner Bonefeld, ‘Capital Par Excellence: On Money as an Obscure Thing’, Estudios de Filosofía 62 (2020): 33–56.
15 Marx, Capital, 255.
16 Joan Robinson, Economic Philosophy. An Essay on the Progress of Economic Thought (London: Penguin, 1962), 68.
17 Marx, Capital, 494, fn. 4.
18 See Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
19 Karl Marx, ‘Letter to Lasalle, 22.2.1858’, in Marx Engels Werke, vol. 29 (Berlin: Dietz, 1963), 550. ‘The economists’ connotes a generic term to depict a disciplinary effort at determining the meaning of the economic categories in abstraction from their social foundation. On this, see Werner Bonefeld, Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014).
20 Marx, cited in Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures, 1964–1965, translated by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 118.
21 Marx, Capital, 739, 639, 742.
22 Ibid., 639.
23 Ibid.
24 Adorno, History and Freedom, 201.
25 Marx, Capital, 92.
26 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by John Cumming (London: Verso, 1979), 168–208.
27 This part paraphrases Adorno, Lectures on History and Freedom, 100–2.
28 See Werner Bonefeld, ‘Antisemitism and the Power of Abstraction’, in Antisemitism and the Constitution of Sociology, edited by Marcel Stoetzler (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 314–32, for a development of this point. See also the contributions to the Special Issue on Antisemitism, Journal of Social Justice, vol. 9, 2019, edited by Shane Burnley.
29 Theodor W. Adorno, Einleitung zur Musiksoziologie (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1962), 30.
30 On this point, see Werner Bonefeld, ‘Primitive Accumulation and Capitalist Accumulation’, Science and Society 75, no. 3 (2011): 379–99.
31 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 375.
32 On the notion of negative totality, see Lars Heitmann, ‘“Totality”: On the Negative-Dialectical Presentation of Capitalist Socialisation’, in The Sage Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, edited by Beverley Best, Werner Bonefeld and Chris O’Kane (London: Sage, 2018), 589–606.
33 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 304.
34 Ibid., 320.
35 This view is central to Erik O Wright’s account in Class Counts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Professional sociology, argues Horkheimer in ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, 221, ‘derives its concept of class not from a critique of economy but from its own observations’, and determines ‘the theoretician’s social position . . . neither by the source of his income nor by the concrete contents of his theory, but by the formal elements of education’. For a critical theory of class, see Tom Houseman, ‘Social Constitution and Class’, in The Sage Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, edited by Beverley Best, Werner Bonefeld and Chris O’Kane (London: Sage, 2018), 697–713.
36 Marx, Capital, 644.
37 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Collected Works, vol. 5 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), 53.
38 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 207.
39 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia. Reflections from Damaged Life, translated by Edmund Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 102.
40 Ibid.
41 Adorno, History and Freedom, 51.
42 Theodor W. Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics. Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/1966, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, translated by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 25.
43 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in idem, Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), 245–55, here 249. Now-time is Benjamin’s conception of a time at which the progress of the muck of ages comes to standstill. Now-time rejects the idea of a present time, which heralds the future as its own being in becoming. On this see Werner Bonefeld, ‘Critical Theory, History, and the Question of Revolution’, in Communism in the 21st Century, vol. 3, edited by Shannon Brincat (Los Angeles, CA: Praeger, 2014), 137–62.
44 Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, 246.
45 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Pluto Press, 1996), 18.
46 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 102.
47 Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, 254.
48 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 265.