Adorno and the critique of political economy
Translated by Lars Fischer
According to Habermas, ‘Adorno was not bothered with political economy.’1 Indeed, on Helmut Reichelt’s account, ‘in private conversation, Adorno made no secret of his aversion to dealing with the economy’.2 In short: ‘Economics were hardly his thing!’3 Nor, incidentally, were they Marx’s thing. In private, Marx readily confessed his despondency at ‘all the economic crap’ he was forced to engage.4 Yet for Adorno, Marx’s ‘genius’ sprang precisely from his determination to grapple with economic issues, his strong aversion to them notwithstanding.5 ‘Proponents of Critical Theory’, Adorno told students attending one of his seminars in 1968, ‘should not let their aversion to the primacy of the economic deter them from giving the critique of political economy a crack’.6 Helmut Reichelt recalled that, not long before his death, Adorno had identified the critique of the value and money forms as the ‘holy grail’ of Critical Theory and its ‘encyclopedic analysis’ as a crucial desideratum.7 Building on Marx’s contention that the ‘anatomy’ of bourgeois society needed to be ‘sought in political economy’, Friedrich Pollock concluded that the latter owned the ‘status of an all-encompassing fundamental discipline’ and that its critique formed the basis of the revolutionary critique of bourgeois society more generally.8 This tallies with Iring Fetscher’s clarification, in his eulogy for Adorno, that, while Adorno had recently ‘admitted to a student just how repulsed he was by the economy, he nevertheless knew that the critique of political economy was the prerequisite of any revolutionary theory or praxis that invokes Marx’.9
Adorno did not begin to engage in his own critique of political economy until he was in exile. In fact, as early as September 1937, Adorno informed Benjamin that ‘the systematic study of Capital’ was now among his top priorities.10 In the first volume of his copy of Capital, Adorno noted the date 10 June 1938, suggesting that he indeed began to study it soon after his arrival in New York.11 Both in New York and in Los Angeles, Adorno familiarized himself with Marx’s theory to such an extent that class theory began to feature prominently in his thought. This is indicated not least by the ‘Reflections on Class Theory’ he wrote in 1942. He began to focus much more intensely on the created nature of society. Adorno came to appreciate that, rather than being a philosophical device that facilitated the conceptualization of modern and premodern social relations alike, the commodity was in fact one category among others required to develop a materialist conception of society and history, and one that applies only to capitalism, at that. Presumably, this also explains why Adorno, his initial enthusiasm in 1936 notwithstanding, largely lost interest in Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s analyses of the nexus between the commodity form and the process of cognition.12 To be sure, the category of the commodity continued to be an important point of reference in his theory, but from a certain point onwards, Adorno was no longer willing to countenance its isolation from the class relations that turn the commodity into a commodity in the first place. Consequently, it could not be an ontological category. He also re-evaluated the significance of class consciousness. Adorno abandoned it as a necessary prerequisite for the existence of classes, instead adopting Marx’s understanding of class as determined by the position of the individual in relation to the means of production.
The following passage from Negative Dialectics points to the coming together of the critique of political economy and utopian thought in Adorno’s philosophy: ‘The critique of the principle of exchange in its capacity as the principle that governs how thought assigns identity wants the ideal of free and just exchange, hitherto a mere pretext, to be realized. This alone would transcend exchange.’13 Adorno’s concept of exchange was based on the form of exchange required for consumption to impact on production. This concerns the ‘decisive point’ at which ‘the commodity labour comes into play’. Here, ‘everything is both above board and yet not above board’.14 Since exchange was predicated on ‘something being both equal and unequal’,15 the ‘illusion in the process of exchange’ resided ‘in the concept of surplus-value’ attached to the very real appropriation of surplus labour by the buyer of the labour under the guise of the exchange of equivalents.16
For Adorno, Marx’s ability to uncover this nexus demonstrated that, rather than ‘merely flirting with its terminology’, Marx was genuinely serious about dialectics.17 The dialectical turn Marx had, on Adorno’s account, recognized was that ‘the assertion of the equivalence of what is exchanged, as the basis of all exchange, is repudiated by its consequences’. ‘As the principle of exchange, by virtue of its immanent dynamics, extends its remit to living human labour it turns into a powerful source of objective inequality.’18
Alex Demirović has suggested that this interpretation is only ‘partially compatible’ with Marx’s theory, given the latter’s contention ‘that the capitalist form of the exchange of equivalents is not fraudulent: labour power is, on average, remunerated at its full value and equality is thus realized’.19 Yet this is in fact precisely what Adorno himself argued. He merely went one step further in recognizing that the equality in the process of exchange reproduces the inequality of classes and individuals. On Demirović’s account, Marx demonstrated ‘how the problem of finding a standard for equality is solved by the emergence of an average of socially necessary labour mediated by the market’.20 Adorno, by contrast, in keeping with Marx, insisted that this measure, precisely by its application in the process of exchange, negated itself. For Adorno, this was ‘the decisive turn in Marx’:
Rather than simply say . . ..: none of this is true, he says: in order to change this enormous apparatus at all we want to use its own momentum to set it in motion. . . . Rather than simply dismiss bourgeois society’s claim that it creates harmony, he takes it entirely at its word and asks: does the society you propagate genuinely correspond to its concept? Is there really a free and just society that corresponds to your world of free and just exchange? In this respect too, by saying that it both does and does not, he remains loyal to the principle of dialectics.21
When Adorno identified the doctrine of surplus value as the ‘centerpiece of Marxian theory’,22 he did so because it offered an account not only of the point of contact between production and consumption, i.e., of an essentially economic phenomenon, but also of ‘the social dynamic that holds everything together and produces the conflicts and conditions that govern society. The theory of surplus value was as much about society as it was about the economy and of equal import to both.’23
The production of surplus value, which is the result and purpose of the exchange of wage for labour power, marks the very point at which
Hegel’s philosophy of history coincides with classical economic theory and also with Marx – the fact that people pursue their own individual interests makes them at the same time the exponents and executors of that same historical objectivity that is ready to turn against their interests at any moment and thus may assert itself over their heads. There is a contradiction here since it is claimed that what asserts itself despite people’s own efforts does so by virtue of them, by virtue of their own interests. But since the society in which we live is antagonistic, and since the course of the world to which we are harnessed is antagonistic too, what we might term this logical contradiction should not be thought of as merely a contradiction, merely the product of an inadequate formulation. It is a contradiction that arises from the situation.24
Consequently, ‘the critique of the relationship between scholarly statements and that to which they refer . . . is inexorably propelled towards the critique of the object itself’.25 In Adorno, as in Marx, critique therefore has a double meaning. It is social criticism and critique of ideology in one, the critique of reality mediated through the critique of a scholarly praxis predicated on the conceit that reality can be shown to be rational.26 ‘Social critique is a critique of knowledge and vice versa.’27 Criticism
must rationally determine whether the shortcomings it encounters are merely the shortcomings of scholarship or the object fails to match the claims scholarship makes about it on the basis of its concepts. . . . In common parlance, criticism quite rightly implies not merely self-criticism . . . but also criticism of the object. . . . Logical criticism and the empathically practical criticism that society must be transformed . . . are two dimensions of one and the same conceptual process.28
On Adorno’s account, bourgeois society, as an ‘antagonistic totality’, was only able to maintain itself qua its contradictions.29 For him, as for Marx, the fundamental antagonism within that totality was one of class. Social totality and social antagonism imply each other. ‘Society stays alive, not despite its antagonism, but by means of it.’30 Since the individual can only reproduce itself within the capital relation, individuals cannot but reproduce the ‘coercive character of society’, a society by which ‘every single one of us is devoured . . . lock, stock and barrel’.31 No individual can escape their role in the capitalist process without facing ruin, and, as Adorno wrote in 1942, the ‘immeasurable pressure of domination has so fragmented the masses’ that ‘the oppressed who today, as predicted by theory, constitute the overwhelming majority of mankind are unable to experience themselves as a class’, unable to recognize ‘that solidarity should be their ultima ratio’. Instead, ‘conformity appears more rational to them’.32 In short, the objective class antagonism persists because society continuously reproduces it. ‘Down to the present day life has succeeded in perpetuating itself only because of this division in society, because a number of people in control confront others who have been separated from the means of production.’33
Adorno criticized Marx, however, for ultimately affirming this state of affairs. ‘You will find’, he explained in one of his lectures on History and Freedom,
that Marx too approves of this affirmation of the coming together of mankind as well as the idea that mankind reproduces itself notwithstanding its sacrifices and sufferings. And if we may look for an element of idealism in Marx, an idealist element in the precise philosophical meaning of the word, this would certainly be the place to find the truly affirmative strand in his thought. It is a strand, moreover, that fits with his predominantly optimistic view of history. The form this Hegelian theme takes in Marx is transformed almost out of all recognition, but retains extraordinary power. It is the highly obscure and difficult theory of the so-called law of value. This is the summation of all the social acts taking place through exchange. It is through this process that society maintains itself and, according to Marx, continues to reproduce itself and expand despite all the catastrophes that may eventuate.34
Marx too remained beholden to ‘“the metaphysics of the forces of production”’,35 ultimately presupposing ‘something like the metaphysical substantiality of these productive forces’, a metaphysics that amounted to a belief in something that was uncannily ‘reminiscent of the Hegelian World Spirit’.36 ‘Ultimately’, this led
to the persistence in Marx of a highly dubious theorem of German idealism. We find it explicitly stated, above all by Engels in the Anti-Dühring. This is the assertion that freedom really amounts to doing consciously what is necessary, something that is of course meaningful only if what is necessary, the World Spirit, the development of the forces of production is in the right a priori and its victory is guaranteed.37
For Adorno, the question of whether it had been unavoidable that humankind perpetuated itself on the basis of this antagonism was moot. ‘The strongest argument that can be presented in support of the contention that things could not go any other way,’ he noted in his sixth lecture on History and Freedom,
hinges on humankind’s grappling with physical nature. It found itself in a situation of scarcity and want with which no other form of organization would supposedly have allowed it to cope; only the relations of domination that compelled human beings both to take the scarcity into account and correct it allowed them to do so, and these could not but incubate this antagonism.38
Marx and Engels had answered the question in the affirmative, stressing, as Adorno put it, ‘that domination, social domination, was a function of the economy, in other words, of the life process, the reproduction of life itself, and not the other way around’.39 However, if ‘economic relations and antagonisms were themselves the product of a fundamental form of domination’, Adorno reasoned, ‘then their necessity would be extraneous to the historical totality, the life process of society’. It would in fact be ‘an accident that could equally well not have occurred’.40 This suggested that the ‘possibility of making a leap forward, of doing things differently, always existed, even in periods when productivity was far less developed’, yet the ‘opportunity was missed again and again’.41 This was a motif Adorno borrowed from Walter Benjamin’s unorthodox Marxism.42
Hitherto, ‘the notion that there should be no scarcity, that nobody on earth should suffer hunger, the notion, in other words, of the completion of the abolition of need’, presupposed an
increase in productive forces and, consequently, also the very domination of nature that has become inextricably enmeshed by no means only with the anti-organic principle. It is conceivable only as long as human beings who, after all, are expected to learn how to control not only their external nature but also what is within them, are constantly required to engage in self-denial. The concept of a state of affairs without (self-)denial, the unleashing of the forces of production, the abolition of need, the utopian moment of unlimited fulfilment, in other words, in order to be at all possible, presuppose restraint, asceticism and some element of repression and oppression.43
Yet the future of humankind depended precisely on ‘whether it is able to extricate itself from this terrible entanglement, the fact that the envisaged alternative state of affairs and the prospective way there, in their quest for realization, develop within themselves the very principle to which they are opposed, and are therefore constantly at risk of relapsing into myth’.44 The steady increase in the social forces of production invariably perpetuated domination; it merely facilitated the constant change required ‘to ensure that everything stays the same’.45 For all its dynamism, society as a whole always remained the same. It never moved beyond its ‘pre-history’ yet presented itself ‘as constantly different, unforeseen, exceeding all expectation, the faithful shadow of developing productive forces’.46 In the context of the forces of production, ‘the very word “unleashed”’, Adorno suggested, ‘has undertones of menace’.47 The constant unfolding of those forces epitomized the ‘merciless domination of nature’ and was integral to the perpetuation of the ever same that Adorno termed myth.48
Nowhere did Adorno come closer to giving a positive outline of sorts of the opposing utopian state of affairs than in his much-cited aphorism ‘Sur l’eau’ in Minima Moralia.49 At its heart lies a form of human existence beyond the compulsion to produce:
The naively imputed unambiguous development towards increased production is itself a piece of that bourgeois outlook which permits development in only one direction because, integrated into a totality, dominated by quantification, it is hostile to qualitative difference. If one conceives of emancipated society as emancipation from precisely that kind of totality, then vanishing-lines come into view that have little in common with increased production and its human reflections. Unrestrained individuals may by no means be the most agreeable or even the freest. Yet a society rid of its fetters would surely be able to (re)discover that the forces of production are not the ultimate substratum of humankind either but in fact reflect a specific historical form of humanity tailored to the production of commodities. Perhaps the true society will grow weary of expansion and take the liberty of passing on possibilities rather than follow its manic compulsion to conquer alien planets. Indeed, it might dawn on a humankind unfamiliar with need, not only how chimerical and futile the efforts previously undertaken to escape need were, but also that, with increasing wealth, they have only reproduced it at an advanced level.50
Adorno’s point of reference at this point was Marx’s treatment of the relations of production as placing limits on the forces of production. At an important juncture in Capital, Marx, construing a historical-philosophical argument with no basis in the critique of political economy, referred, not without pathos, to the revolutionary impact of the centralization of capital.
The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour reach a point where they become incompatible with, and burst, their capitalist mantle. The bell tolls for capitalist private property. The expropriators are expropriated.51
The notion that identified progress with the growth of the forces of production and material wealth ultimately sprang from an idealistic philosophy of history that Adorno was unwilling to countenance. Not that Adorno would have questioned Marx’s analysis that ‘the wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities”’ and the commodity was its basic unit.52 However, what Marx had overlooked, however, was that, hopelessly embroiled in the commodity form, ‘the gifts of fortune themselves become elements of misfortune’.53 In ‘Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?’, Adorno noted wryly that there was ‘only one respect’ in which the relations of production had so far
failed to shackle the forces of production: that of total annihilation. But the dirigiste methods for controlling the masses presuppose a concentration and centralization that have a technological dimension as well as an economic one, something that would have to be shown from a study of the mass media. For this would demonstrate how, from a few points, the consciousness of countless people can be brought into line simply by the selection and presentation of news and commentary.54
As long as humankind dominated nature, it was itself, in turn, dominated by nature because its attempts to rise above it entangled not only the forces of production with the domination of the relations of production but also the socially conditioned individuals with nature. So far, human beings had only ever had the choice ‘between their subjugation to nature and its subjugation to the self’.55
Regardless of whether, in its desire to combat need and fear, humankind originally had no choice but to become perpetually entangled with uncomprehended nature or not, fact was that now, following the disenchantment of nature, it was no longer compelled to do so. Domination could be abolished, and that abolition was long overdue. Yet society perpetuated its subjection to nature, despite its long since having become obsolete, ‘as the permanent, organized compulsion which, reproducing itself in individuals as systematic self-preservation, rebounds against nature as society’s control over it’.56 As long as humankind, still unaware of itself and unthinkingly defined as a species, not least, in terms of its domination over nature, prolonged the compulsion of nature it could constitute itself only as a ‘gigantic public company for the exploitation of nature’ of which society at large and the individuals shaped by it assume that it is their only option.57 ‘Civilization is the triumph of society over nature – a triumph which transforms everything into mere nature.’58 If the domination of nature ceased, humankind would no longer be beholden to it and could long since have been reconciled with it. For Adorno, this reconciliation of subject and object, the ‘theological archetype’ of his utopian vision,59 had nothing to do with some notion of a return to nature.60 ‘Freedom’, Adorno noted in Negative Dialectics, ‘can come to be real only through coercive civilization, not by way of any “Back to nature”’.61 Adorno wanted to transcend the dichotomy of nature and society. Only this, by means of determinate negation, ‘would set the nonidentical free and take even the intellectualized compulsion from it. Only it would facilitate a multiplicity of difference beyond the grasp of the dialectic. Reconciliation would be the recollection – anathema to subjective reason – of the manifold which would then no longer be inimical.’62
Building on Marx’s critical insight that exchange involved ‘things that are equal and yet unequal’, Adorno insisted that the ‘goal of the critique of the inequality within equality is still equality, regardless of our skepticism in the face of the hostility the bourgeois ideal of egalitarianism displays towards all things qualitatively different’.63 This scepticism, he clarified, concerned the way in which the hollow equality of bourgeois society promoted conformism, not against a ‘state of affairs which would make it an act of repression to count the beefburgers because everyone could have as many as they liked anyway, while others may, under these circumstances, decide that eating meat is beneath them altogether. Until then, the vulgar-materialist phraseology of sharing remains valid.’64 In the meantime, ‘there is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry anymore’.65
Although Adorno repeatedly emphasized just how much the current state of the forces of production would already facilitate,66 it would take more to create a truly emancipated society and allow humankind genuinely to come into its own. The coexistence of excess, on the one hand, and existential need, on the other, resulted not from inefficient administration. One resulted from the other. Overcoming capitalism to set free the forces of production alone would not suffice to reconcile society. The conflict between the general and the particular, for example, would remain unresolved. The ‘integral bureaucratic domination’ that formed an indispensable prerequisite for the high levels of repression and compulsion required to perpetuate society and keep it and those within it on the road guaranteed that ‘the horrific too can function in perpetuity’.67 Today, proletarians most certainly did have ‘more to lose than their chains. Measured against conditions in England a century ago as they were evident to the authors of the Communist Manifesto, their standard of living has not deteriorated but improved.’68 Consequently, Marxist immiseration theory, which claimed that the material deprivation endured by proletarians not only united them as a self-confident class but also formed the basis of their revolutionary power, had lost its credibility. Yet Adorno concluded that it is not the thrust of the theory that should be modified but the concept of immiseration that needs to be revisited. ‘The theater of a cryptogenic – as it were censored – poverty, however, is that of political and social impotence.’69 One could only describe the process by which late capitalism turned all human beings into administrative units as a form of ‘dehumanization’.70 The totality had integrated the oppressed, shaped them in its image. Whereas their wretchedness had once set them apart, it now ‘lies in the fact that they can never escape’.71
Providing for everyone’s material needs would neither rule out a new form of domination nor would it be a sufficient guarantee for the ‘happiness of humankind which would be the happiness of the individual’.72 As early as 1944, Adorno had noted:
[I]n today’s objective situation, the notion of a necessary period of transition towards fully fledged socialism contradicts the standard of the material forces of production to such an extent that it sounds rather like an excuse for the consolidation of domination. In their defence, one should note that even the most measured Marxists who had more or less stopped being Marxists altogether assumed the initial phase would be shorter than the period Christians expect to lapse between the birth of Jesus and the Parousia, which is pretty much the entirety of this-worldly time.73
For Adorno, happiness is not, as Rolf Tiedemann has suggested, ‘a plurale tantum: happiness is the happiness of the species or it does not exist’.74 For, ‘if humanity were a totality that no longer contained any limiting principle, it would be free from the coercion that subjects all its members to such a principle. It would thereby cease to be a totality so that it might finally become a totality.’75 The ‘vision of happiness without shame’ points to human beings who are no longer phylogenetically and socially enmeshed and mere specimens of their species, but nor would they be juxtaposed to society as outcasts.76 ‘Utopia’, as Adorno saw it, would be a state of affairs in which ‘the subject could own its nonidentity without sacrifice’.77 The ‘bad equality’ peddled by ‘the familiar argument of tolerance’, according to which all human beings are the same,78 would be transcended by a form of association in which human beings ‘could be different without fear’.79 An emancipated society ‘would not be standardized’ and instead ‘achieve the universalizing reconciliation of differences’;80 it would create a ‘state of differentiation without domination in which the differentiated elements are mutually accepting of one another’.81
Adorno took issue with the ‘cult of community as an end in itself’. It indicated ‘that one has forgotten about the content of community, the goal of creating a world worthy of humankind. . . . A genuine community could only be one comprising free human beings’.82 This would require exchange to become what it could, given its origin in the identity principle, also be: just. ‘In society as it ought to be, exchange would be not only abolished but fulfilled.’83 To be sure,
Humanity requires that the law of an eye for an eye, the quid pro quo, be brought to an end; that the odious exchange of equivalents, in which age-old myth is recapitulated in rational economics, cease. The process, however, has its dialectical crux in the requirement that what rises above exchange not fall back behind it; that the suspension of exchange not once again deny human beings, as the objects of order, the full fruit of their labor. The abolition of the exchange of equivalents would be its fulfillment; as long as equality reigns as law, the individual is cheated of equality.84
Following the demise of exchange in its current form, all systematic economic categories would disintegrate. Exchange would no longer be an economic phenomenon. Humankind would be ‘redeemed from just exchange by its finally unfolding in a just manner’.85
According to Adorno, the injustice that springs from the fact that ‘the doctrine of like-for-like is a lie’ has prevailed from the beginnings of recorded human history to this day.86 This was borne out, inter alia, by Anaximander’s ‘ur-bourgeois’ dictum that ‘the Non-Limited is the original material of existing things; further, the source from which existing things derive their existence is also that to which they return at their destruction, according to necessity; for they give justice and make reparations to one another for their injustice, according to the arrangement of Time’.87 For Adorno, ‘Anaximander’s curse’ provided early evidence of the ‘sort of right that makes a mockery of justice’.88 It was characterized by ‘an aspect of archaic legal vindictiveness’, legitimized by myth.89 ‘The law that defined itself as punishment for lawlessness comes to resemble it and itself becomes lawlessness, an order for destruction: that, however, is the nature of myth as it is echoed in pre-Socratic thought.’90 Anaximander had already outlined the ongoing dynamic that ‘reproduced the same pattern over and over again’.91 Subjects were ‘not completely in control, either of themselves, or of society’.92 ‘To this day’, in other words, ‘not matter how one tries to construe it, history lacks a total subject’.93
‘All the rationalizations notwithstanding’, Adorno explained, ‘the social process is stuck in an irrational cycle. In a sense, and this is already the case in Hegel, the historical dialectic implies constant transience. What Marx, at one point, with hopeful melancholia, called pre-history epitomizes all recorded history to this day, the realm of bondage.’94 This negative motif also featured in Adorno’s ‘Reflections on Class Theory’. The theory that all history to date had been a history of class struggle – a concept that emerged only once the proletariat entered the stage – ‘by extending the concept of class to prehistory . . . denounces not just the bourgeois, whose freedom, together with their possession and education, perpetuates the tradition of the old injustice. It also turns on prehistory itself’.95 ‘By exposing the historical necessity that had brought capitalism into being’, the critique of political economy emerged as a ‘critique of history in its entirety’.96 In short, ‘all history is the history of class struggles because it was always the same thing, namely, prehistory’. This insight provided ‘a pointer as to how we can recognize what history is. From the most recent form of injustice, a steady light reflects back on history as a whole.’97 This was why ‘dialectical theory insisted on perennial categories that merely changed their appearance in the modern, rational, form of society. Consequently, the terms Marx uses, for instance, when calling free wage labour “wage slavery”, are no mere metaphors’.98 History had hitherto encompassed the perpetual repetition of the ever same, of exploitation, domination and oppression, and progress – from overt theft to concealed theft through exchange, from slavery to wage labour,99 from arbitrary rule to the rule of law – had amounted merely to a ‘change in the form of this servitude’.100 The potential for regression drawing on ever more refined techniques of violent domination and control was constantly present.101 As long as this was the case, myth had only seemingly been overcome and history continued to impose itself, uncomprehended and fate-like, on the individual with even greater force.
And yet, the injustice inherent in the exchange of equivalents was also ‘the condition for possible justice. The fulfillment of the repeatedly broken exchange contract would converge with its abolition; exchange would disappear, if truly equal things were exchanged; true progress would not be merely an Other in relation to exchange, but rather exchange that has been brought to itself.’102 For Adorno, the fact that an emphatic notion of justice had not previously been realized was no reason to abandon it. The abstract negation of the principle of equality or abolition of the exchange of equivalents offered no solution. After all,
If we proclaimed, to the greater glory of the irreducibly qualitative, that parity should no longer be the ideal rule – we would be creating excuses to relapse into the old injustice. The main characteristic of the exchange of equivalents has, since time immemorial, been that unequal things would be exchanged in its name, that the surplus value of labor would be appropriated.103
Indeterminate negation would ‘skip over individual interests in an abstract way’ and ‘reproduce particularity in the bad sense. Dwelling on – lingering with – the concrete is an inextinguishable aspect of anything that frees itself from particularity. At the same time, that movement of emancipation shows the specificity of particularity to be just as limited as the blind domination of a totality that does not respect particularity.’104 This, then, was the perpetually unresolved dilemma of all previous history in general and bourgeois society in particular: ‘how reason can liberate itself from the particularity of obdurate particular interest, on the one hand, without then falling prey to the no less obdurate particular interests of the totality again, on the other. It is not just philosophy that has hitherto failed in the face of this challenge – so too has the organization of humankind.’105 For Adorno, the decisive question in need of both a logical and a practical solution was always how a whole could ‘exist without doing violence to the individual part’.106 In the current society, exchange takes the form of value equivalence. Once it had been abolished, unmediated unequal exchange could not be the solution. ‘If comparability as a category of measure were simply annulled’, Adorno wrote, ‘the rationality which is inherent in the exchange principle – as ideology, of course, but also as promise – would give way to direct appropriation, to force, and nowadays to the naked privilege of monopolies and cliques.’107 The suggestion that, in ‘post-capitalist societies . . . exchange will have ceased to take place’, was nonsense.108 Rather, exchange would become inherently just, the justice of the particular would no longer be quashed by a totality that subordinated the individual.
Adorno’s critique of political economy takes issue with a society in which progress, all its inherent dynamism notwithstanding, always remains static insofar as it never points to anything beyond itself. It is entirely an end in itself, progress for the sake of progress. The Marxian critique of political economy, Adorno argued, was flawed insofar as it regressed into ‘reified and, in many cases, truly “economistic” thinking’ and succumbed to a ‘fetishization of the economic sphere’.109 By contrast, Adorno wanted to
uncover the dialectical core of Marx’s economy, which exists malgré lui-même, as it were, and demonstrate that the decisive categories – such as the commodity, the forces of production, the rate of profit – really do have their own momentum. This presupposes, however, that, contrary to his aspirations, one does not think of this core as a form of systematic economics or even as a representation of the developmental laws of the capitalist economy but, rather, assumes that each concept, at its heart, is objectively determined by critical intention. He was not trying to outline the dynamics of free and just exchange but plays the tune of ‘If you would dance, my pretty Count’: you speak of free and just exchange. Well then, here you have your free and just exchange, but it will transpire that, precisely by unfolding in accordance with its concept, it is the opposite of free and just exchange, and the appropriation of surplus value is innate to its purpose. To put it in a less economistic way: exchange relations, raised to the level of a totality, are class relations. Equal is unequal. For us, this core, which, alas, orthodox Marx exegetes would be the last to acknowledge, is dialectical.110
Notes
1 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Theodor Adorno: The Primal History of Subjectivity – Self-Affirmation Gone Wild (1969)’, in Philosophical-Political Profiles, translated by Fredrick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 99–109, here 109.
2 Helmut Reichelt, ‘Marx’s Critique of Economic Categories: Reflections on the Problem of Validity in the Dialectical Method of Presentation in Capital’, Historical Materialism 15, 4 (2007): 3–52, here 4.
3 Jürgen Ritsert, ‘Realabstraktion. Ein zu recht abgewertetes Thema der kritischen Theorie?’, in Kein Staat zu machen. Zur Kritik der Sozialwissenschaften, edited by Christoph Görg and Roland Roth (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 1998), 324–48, here 331.
4 Karl Marx, letter to Friedrich Engels, 2 April 1851, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1974–2004), hereafter MECW, vol. 38, 325–26, here 325 (translation amended).
5 Hans-Georg Backhaus, ‘Theodor W. Adorno on “Marx and the Basic Concepts of Sociological Theory”. From a Seminar Transcript in the Summer Semester of 1962’, translated by Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson and Chris O’Kane, in Historical Materialism 26, no. 1 (2018): 154–64, here 164. Reprinted in the Appendix of this book.
6 Lecture course Introduction to Sociology, seminar minutes, 9 July 1968, quoted in Dirk Braunstein, Adornos Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Bielefeld: transcript, 2016), 10.
7 Helmut Reichelt, Neue Marx-Lektüre. Zur Kritik sozialwissenschaftlicher Logik (Freiburg: Ça ira, 2013), 39.
8 Karl Marx, ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’, in MECW, vol. 29, 257–417, here 262; Friedrich Pollock, ‘Zur Geldtheorie von Karl Marx’, reprint in idem, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, edited by Philipp Lenhard (Freiburg: Ça ira, 2018), 25–127, here 32.
9 Iring Fetscher, ‘Ein Kämpfer ohne Illusion’, in Theodor W. Adorno zum Gedächtnis. Eine Sammlung, edited by Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), 90–4, here 93.
10 Theodor W. Adorno, letter to Walter Benjamin, 13 September 1937, in Adorno and Benjamin, Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940, translated by Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), 207–10, here 210.
11 See Braunstein, Adornos Kritik, 101.
12 See Theodor W. Adorno, letter to Alfred Sohn-Rethel, 17 November 1936, in Theodor W. Adorno and Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Briefwechsel 1936–1969 (Munich: edition text + kritik, 1991), 32–4.
13 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, translated by E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 147.
14 Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie I und II (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2016), 617.
15 Backhaus, ‘Theodor W. Adorno on “Marx”’, 158 (translation amended).
16 Ibid., 160.
17 Ibid., 158 (translation amended).
18 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Introduction’, in idem et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, translated by Glyn Adey and David Frisby (London: Heinemann, 1976), 1–67, here 25 (translation amended).
19 Alex Demirović, ‘Freiheit und Menschheit’, in Vereinigung freier Individuen. Kritik der Tauschgesellschaft und gesellschaftliches Gesamtsubjekt bei Theodor W. Adorno, edited by Jens Becker and Heinz Brakemeier (Hamburg: VSA, 2004), 22–3.
20 Ibid., 23.
21 Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie, 616.
22 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?’, in Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, translated by Rodney Livingstone, edited by Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 111–25, here 115.
23 Seminar minutes from Adorno’s seminar, Economy and Society I, 3 December 1957, quoted in Alex Demirović, Der nonkonformistische Intellektuelle. Die Entwicklung der Kritischen Theorie zur Frankfurter Schule (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), 463.
24 Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures, 1964–1965, translated by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 26–7.
25 Adorno, ‘Introduction’, 24 (translation amended).
26 See Alfred Schmidt, ‘On the Concept of Knowledge in the Criticism of Political Economy’, in Karl Marx, 1818/1968, edited by Golo Mann et al. (Bad Godesberg: Inter Nationes, 1968), 92–102, here 92–3.
27 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Subject and Object’ in Subject and Object. Frankfurt School Writings on Epistemology, Ontology, and Method, translated by E. B. Ashton, edited by Ruth Groff (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 149–64, here 156.
28 Adorno, ‘Introduction’, 24–5 (translation amended).
29 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy’, in Hegel: Three Studies, translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 1–51, here 28.
30 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 320. ‘I shall say here only that the essence of this model of an antagonistic society is that it is not a society with contradictions or despite its contradictions, but by virtue of its contradictions. In other words, a society based on profit necessarily contains this division in society because of the objective existence of the profit motive. This profit motive which divides society and potentially tears it apart is also the factor by means of which society reproduces its own existence.’ Theodor W. Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics. Fragments of a Lecture Course, 1965/1966, translated by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 8–9.
31 Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophical Elements of a Theory of Society, 1964, translated by Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2019), 68 (translation amended).
32 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Reflections on Class Theory’, translated by Rodney Livingstone, in Adorno, Can One Live after Auschwitz?, 97.
33 Adorno, History and Freedom, 51.
34 Ibid., 49–50.
35 Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics, 96. As Adorno explained, this concept drew on ideas articulated by Alfred Seidel, one of the friends of his youth. ‘In order to present a consistent concept of history’, Seidel had noted, ‘[Marx], like [Hegel], was compelled to assume that there was one driving force inherent in history. As a realist, he rejected Hegel’s metaphysics of the spirit and substituted the economy for it. . . . Consequently, the driving force inherent in history could only be economic in nature, more precisely, the factors that facilitate or increase the productivity of labour, i.e., the “forces of production”. . . . Given that these were supposedly the driving force inherent in history, they were hypostatized as an absolute and metaphysical – albeit immanent metaphysical – entity, inadvertently creating an historical philosophy analogous to its transcendent-metaphysical predecessors from the Old Testament to Hegel.’ Alfred Seidel, Bewußtsein als Verhängnis, edited by Hans Prinzhorn (Bonn: Friedrich Cohen, 1927), 209–10.
36 Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics, 96.
37 Ibid., 96–7. See also, Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie, 314–15 and Friedrich Engels, ‘Anti-Dühring’, in MECW, vol. 25, 5–309, here 105–6.
38 Adorno, History and Freedom, 52 (translation amended).
39 Ibid., 52.
40 Ibid., 53 (translation amended).
41 Ibid., 67.
42 See ibid., 89–90.
43 Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie, 525.
44 Ibid., 525–6.
45 Alex Demirović, ‘Zur Dialektik von Utopie und bestimmter Negation. Eine Diskussionsbemerkung’, in Kritische Wissenschaften im Neoliberalismus, edited by Christina Kaindl (Marburg: BdWi-Verlag, 2005), 144.
46 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia. Reflections from Damaged Life, translated by Edmund Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 234.
47 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 307.
48 Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie, 524. ‘Myth’, Adorno noted in March 1969, ‘is not that which is not the case. Rather, it is the cobbled together ever same in the world. Resistance to it is spirit, is the subject. In a reality beyond the existential need in which it originates and whose marks it bears, spirit would be able, and compelled, to change, right down to its very core; it will not simply die away. Each time something is rendered concrete, the phantom of abstract nihilism dissipates. . . . Myth = the conflated world: that is how it is that is how it will always be that is how it is supposed to be.’ Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Graeculus (II). Notizen zu Philosophie und Gesellschaft 1943–1969’, in Frankfurter Adorno Blätter 8 (2003): 9–41, here 35.
49 For a more detailed discussion of this aphorism, see Gerhard Schweppenhauser, Theodor W. Adorno: An introduction, translated by James Rolleston (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 78–90.
50 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 156–7 (translation amended).
51 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, in MECW, vol. 35, 750 (translation amended).
52 Ibid., 45.
53 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical Fragments, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), xviii.
54 Adorno, ‘Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?’, 122.
55 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 25.
56 Ibid., 149.
57 Adorno, History and Freedom, 45.
58 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 153.
59 Rolf Tiedemann, ‘Concept, Image, Name. On Adorno’s Utopia of Knowledge’, in The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, edited by Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 123–45, here 126.
60 As Eckart Goebel has noted, ‘it is astonishing that the notion that Adorno, in the manner of Rousseau, propagated a return to a pristine, unformed nature as it had supposedly existed before man pounced on, and had his way with, it has become a widespread cliché. The dialectic persists, spirit does not give up on spirit. . . . Formulated in abstracto: the accusation that Adorno was a naïve disciple of nature fails to take into account that Adorno is concerned with the in between, with the point of regression and the utopian vision of spirit, without relinquishing either of the two poles’. Eckart Goebel, ‘Das Hinzutretende. Ein Kommentar zu den Seiten 226 bis 230 der Negativen Dialektik’, in Frankfurter Adorno Blätter 4 (1995): 109–16, here 112.
61 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 147.
62 Ibid., 6 (translation amended).
63 Ibid., 147 (translation amended).
64 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Contra Paulum’, in Briefwechsel 1927–1969, vol. 2: 1938–1944, idem and Max Horkheimer (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), 475–503, here 497–8.
65 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 156.
66 See, for example, the following comment: ‘The forces of production, the material forces of production, have today advanced to such an extent that a rational organization of society would render need obsolete. In the nineteenth century, the contention that this would hold true for the entire planet, at a global level, would have been dismissed with disdain as grossly utopian. . . . This much seems clear: given how enormously the objective possibilities have increased, the kind of critique of utopian concepts that hinged on the persistence of scarcity is really obsolete.’ Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Diskussionsbeitrag zu “Spätkapitalismus oder Industriegesellschaft?”’, in Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 8 (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 578–87, here 585. For similar remarks, see also Adorno, History and Freedom, 99.
67 Adorno, ‘Introduction’, 26.
68 Adorno, ‘Reflections on Class Theory’, 103 (translation amended).
69 Ibid., 105.
70 Ibid., 109 and passim.
71 Ibid., 109–10.
72 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 352 (translation amended).
73 Adorno, ‘Contra Paulum’, 493.
74 Rolf Tiedemann, ‘“Gegenwärtige Vorwelt”. Zu Adornos Begriff des Mythischen (I)’, in Frankfurter Adorno Blätter 5 (1998): 9–36, here 10.
75 Adorno, History and Freedom, 146. See also, idem, ‘Progress’, in Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, translated by Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 143–60, here 145–6.
76 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Graeculus (I). Musikalische Notizen’, in Frankfurter Adorno Blätter 7 (2001): 9–36, here 16.
77 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 281 (translation amended).
78 As Adorno noted in Jargon of Authenticity, ‘being human becomes the most general and empty form of privilege. It is strictly suited to a form of consciousness that no longer tolerates privilege and yet is still under its spell. Yet, given that it passes over the unmitigated disparities in social power – between hunger and overabundance, between spirit and docile idiocy – this brand of universal humanness is ideology, the grimace of the innate equality of all beings who bear a human countenance. They respond with chaste sentimentality as they allow themselves to be addressed, at no cost to anyone, as human beings’. Theodor W. Adorno, Jargon of Authenticity, translated by Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 66 (translation amended).
79 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 103.
80 Ibid. (translation amended).
81 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On Subject and Object’, in Critical Models. Interventions and Catchwords, translated by Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 245–58, here 247 (translation amended).
82 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Thesen gegen die musikpädagogische Musik’, in idem, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 14 (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 437–40, here 438.
83 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 295–6.
84 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On the Classicism of Goethe’s Iphigenie’, in idem, Notes to Literature, translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 418–28, here 425 (translation amended).
85 Adorno, Jargon of Authenticity, 152 (translation amended).
86 Adorno, ‘Progress’, 159. ‘To recognize the catastrophic violence in the latest form of injustice, that is to say, the latent injustice contained in fair exchange’, Adorno noted, ‘means simply to identify it with the prehistory that it destroyed’. Adorno, ‘Reflections on Class Theory’, 93–4.
87 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Experiential Content of Hegel’s Philosophy’, in Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993), 53–88, here 86. Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to The Pre-Socratic Philosophers. A Complete Translation of the Fragments in Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 19.
88 Theodor W. Adorno, Against Epistemology. A Metacritique, translated by Willis Domingo (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 25; Theodor W. Adorno, letter to Max Horkheimer, 10 January 1945, in idem and Max Horkheimer, Briefwechsel 1927–1969, vol. 3: 1945–1949 (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 10–15, here 12.
89 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 267.
90 Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, translated by Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 2005), 107.
91 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘“Static” and “Dynamic” as Sociological Categories’, translated by H. Kaal, Diogenes 9, no. 33 (1961): 28–49, here 45.
92 Ibid.
93 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 304 (translation amended).
94 Adorno, ‘“Static” and “Dynamic”’, 45 (translation amended).
95 Adorno, ‘Reflections on Class Theory’, 93.
96 Ibid.
97 Ibid., 94.
98 Adorno, ‘“Static” and “Dynamic”’, 45 (translation amended). In texts that were predominantly polemical rather than scholarly, Marx occasionally contrasted ‘Capital and Wage Slavery’. Karl Marx, ‘The Civil War in France. Address of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association’, in MECW, vol. 22, 307–59, here 335 (translation amended).
99 As Marx noted in the first volume of Capital, ‘the essential difference between the various economic forms of society, between, for instance, a society based on slave labour, and one based on wage labour, lies only in the mode in which this surplus labour is in each case extracted from the actual producer, the labourer’. MECW, vol. 35, 226–7.
100 See ibid., 706 (translation amended).
101 ‘The horde, a term that . . . features in the organizational scheme of the Hitler Youth’, Horkheimer and Adorno wrote in Dialectic of Enlightenment, ‘is no relapse into the old barbarism. It is the triumph of a repressive form of egalitarianism, the degeneration of the equality of rights into the wrong inflicted by equals’. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 9 (translation amended).
102 Adorno, ‘Progress’, 159.
103 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 146.
104 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On the Final Scene of Faust’, in idem, Notes to Literature, translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 124–30, here 128.
105 Adorno, History and Freedom, 45 (translation amended).
106 Theodor W. Adorno, Beethoven. The Philosophy of Music, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), 34.
107 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 146–7 (translation amended). ‘Since time immemorial’, Adorno noted, ‘not just since the capitalist appropriation of surplus value in the commodity exchange of labor power for the cost of its reproduction, the societally more powerful contracting party receives more than the other. By means of this injustice something new occurs in the exchange: the process, which proclaims its own stasis, becomes dynamic. The truth of the expansion feeds on the lie of the equality’. Adorno, ‘Progress’, 159.
108 Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 31.
109 Theodor W. Adorno, letter to Jürgen von Kempski, 27 January 1950, quoted in Braunstein, Adornos Kritik, 391.
110 Ibid. Marx and Engels cited ‘If you would dance, my pretty Count’, the aria from Mozart’s The Wedding of Figaro, in an article published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung on 12 August 1848. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘The German Citizenship and the Prussian Police’, in MECW, vol. 7, 383–4, here 384. It seems more likely, however, that Adorno, when making this reference, was thinking of a well-known passage in the introduction to the critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right, in which Marx referred to the ‘petrified relations’ that characterized German society and which ‘must be forced to dance by singing their own tune to them!’ Karl Marx, ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction’, in MECW, vol. 3, 175–87, here 178.