Economic objectivity and negative dialectics: On class and struggle
The chapter presents negative dialectics as a dialectics of society in the form of the economic object. Negative dialectics refuses to accept the economic categories as categories of economic nature. Instead, it sets out to expose them as categories of historically specific social relations. Its conception of economic nature as a socially constituted nature entails the class antagonism in the concept of economic objectivity. Negative dialectics is the presentation of capitalist social praxis in the form of seemingly independent economic categories.
The assertion that Adorno’s negative dialectics amounts to a critique of the constituted relations of economic objectivity, is not a common view. Martin Jay and Jürgen Habermas no less have argued that Adorno’s critical theory did not concern itself with political economy or economics, be it bourgeois economics or Marxian economics.1 However, what would a critical theory of society amount to if it were not to concern itself with the manner in which society maintains itself? Why, really, does this content, human social reproduction, take the form of seemingly self-moving economic forces and what therefore is the content of these economic forces?2 Adorno’s characterization of negative dialectics as critique of ‘the ontology of the wrong state of things’, which is to establish that ‘all concepts, even the philosophical ones, refer to non-conceptualities’, does not exclude the economic concepts.3 Even the philosophical concepts are not excluded!4 According to Adorno ‘illusion dominates reality’ and it does so because ‘[e]xchange value, merely a mental configuration when compared with use value, dominates human needs and replaces them’.5
The subtitle, ‘on class and struggle’, comprises a second uncommon view. Critical theory is normally discussed as an immanent critique of philosophical concepts, social phenomena and cultural experiences, not as a negative dialectics of political economy and its class theory.6 The chapter holds that the negative dialectics of the relations of economic objectivity recognizes human suffering and social struggle as the non-conceptual premise of the economic categories.7 The non-conceptual is not only the vanished premise of the economic concept of, say, price. It also appears in it – with a price tag. It is, however, the case that Jürgen Habermas introduced a theory of social practice as communicative action.8 For him communicative action is the means of reason, which announces itself in public speeches and pronouncements, and parliamentary deliberations. Communicative action is about the achievement of a civilized society.9 In distinction, the class struggle, which is about ‘crude and basic material things’, belongs to an uncivilized society, in which the class tied to work struggles to make a living.10 Indeed, one could argue that communicative action is the means of overcoming the conflicts and hardships of a class-ridden society through the application of reason. It is to civilize bourgeois society for the sake of humanity, peace and tranquillity according to the norms of justice, equality and liberty.
Honneth’s theory of recognition expands on Habermas. According to Axel Honneth bourgeois society contains within itself the ‘promise of freedom’.11 This would suggest that bourgeois society also contains within itself the ‘promise’ of a freedom from want and therewith from the class struggle to make ends meet. For the sake of this freedom, Honneth’s argument implies that the existing form of society has to develop its potential to the full in order to make good on its promises. In this view, the struggle for access to crude material things, the satisfaction of human needs, is not innate to capitalist society. Rather, it manifests a social pathology of unfreedom that can be overcome through a politics of social justice or recognition.12 Bourgeois society ought to be civil, just and fair in the treatment of its workers. Who would object to that view? Yet, what really does this mean?13
In contrast to the contemporary critical theory represented by Honneth and Habermas, Adorno understood that in capitalist society ‘the needs of human beings, the satisfaction of human beings, is never more than a sideshow’.14 For Adorno the ‘total movement of society’ is ‘antagonistic form the outset’15 and ‘society remains class struggle’.16 For him, what existing society promises is not freedom from want. Rather, it promises that those without property, free traders in labour power, will have to struggle to make a living.
The presentation of Adorno’s negative dialectics as a critique of society in the form of the economic object takes its cue from Max Horkheimer’s remarks that ‘human beings produce, through their own labour, a reality that increasingly enslaves them’ and that therefore Marx’s critique of political economy amounts to a ‘judgment on existence’.17 The account starts with a section on economic objectivity as the subject matter of negative dialectics. It argues that ‘materialism is not the dogma indicted by clever opponents, but a dissolution of things understood as dogmatic’.18 Then follows a section on Adorno’s dictum that ‘society remains class struggle’. It argues that class is a negative category and it develops this point with reference to Adorno’s critique of the capitalist exchange relations. The final section – Looking on the Bright Side of the Wronged World – is the conclusion. It sums up the negative dialectics of economic objectivity and argues that, like Marx’s critique of political economy, it too is a manifestation of philosophy’s search for the good and reasonable organisation of life.19 It holds that ‘there is a tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one should go hungry anymore’.20
Economic objectivity and negative dialectics
In the disciplinary division of academic labour, Adorno’s negative dialectics as a critique of bourgeois society in the form of the economic object is found wanting. Sociology is the dedicated science of the society. According to the established view, it deals with the relationships between people. It analyses interpersonal relationships ‘without paying too much attention to their objectified economic forms’.21 It observes the social relations, analyses the social facts and attributes meaning to them, and then classifies their social attributions into ideal-typical models of social inter-action, without ever once asking itself why society organizes its reproduction in the form of independent economic categories, of profit, cash and rent. It considers the comprehension of the forms of social wealth, conceived by Marx as the independent, ghost-like movement of value, as a matter of economics. However, like sociology, economics, as the dedicated science of economic matter, does not pay attention to the objectified economic forms either. Economics recognizes economic quantities, represents their movements with mathematical accuracy, rationalizes the economic aspects of society with the help of algebraic formulae, predicts on the basis of available economic data what markets will do next, describes the manner in which the human agents (have to) adjust to market demands for the sake of achieving greater economic efficacy, and explores the means of state as the public authority of economic regulation to achieve optimum factor efficiency – for the sake of economic progress measured by the rate of growth.
For economic thought the essence of economics is not Man (Mensch), her needs and desires. Rather, the essence of economics is economic nature, which it presumes to be valid because of itself. Yet, it does not tell us what it is. Economics ascribes subjective power to economic things and argues that the movements of economic quantities express value preferences, which reveal a rationality of economic action that expresses itself in the form of price movements, which manifest a dynamic of competition that ‘is supposed to keep the whole process alive and even cause it to progress, as if it were moved by an “invisible hand”’.22 As the designated science of economic matter, economics translates quantities of ‘capital’ into algebra and, on the condition of undistorted competition in undivided markets, assigns the power of economic regulation to some omnipotent invisible hand that tells the social individuals what to buy, where to invest, and how to achieve optimum factor efficiency of themselves as embodiments of human capital.23
There really is, as Dirk Braunstein remarks drily, no economist by the name of Adorno.24 Nor is there a sociologist by the name of Adorno. According to Adorno negative dialectics ‘flouts tradition’25 and he argues that the division between economics and sociology ‘sets aside the really central interests of both disciplines’.26 Neither focuses on the manner in which society organizes the satisfaction of its needs and neither concerns itself with the specific form of capitalist wealth – money that yields more money – its production, circulation, law of movement, and its financial forms and crisis-ridden character.27 In the hands of the economists economic laws are ‘metamorphosed . . . into a pretended law of nature’28 and for the sociologists ‘society is nothing but the average of individual reactive moves’.29 Both disciplines recognize that the social conflicts have to do with the competitive struggle over the distribution of wealth – who gets what and how much – yet, neither scrutinizes the social relations of production.
What is entirely overlooked is that this conflict of interests, as manifested in competition, is itself a dilute derivative of much deeper conflicts, those between classes. The former conflicts are really the ones which take place after the central conflict over control of the means of production, has already been decided, so that the competition is carried on within the sphere of an already appropriated surplus value.30
A few notable exceptions apart, there is hardly a book or journal article that raises the issue of economic objectivity as a topic of negative dialectics and this despite Adorno’s insistence that ‘a critical theory of society [is] represented prototypically by that of Marx’.31 Marx, argues Adorno, directed his critique of political economy ‘at the substance’ of society, that is, the ‘social production and reproduction of the life of society as a whole’.32 For Marx, the focus of critique is the social relations of production, that is, ‘the actual, given relations of life . . . which . . . have become apotheosized’33 in the form of seemingly self-moving economic forces that economic science sets out to quantify with mathematical precision and that sociology fails to recognize when it investigates interpersonal relations based on income, labour market position, educational status, gender, ethnicity, health, etc.34 Adorno captures this process of the inversion of social relations into seemingly self-moving mysterious economic forces when he argues that ‘the objective rationality of society, namely that of exchange, continues to distance itself through its own dynamic, from the model of logical reason. Consequently, society – what has been made independent – is, in turn, no longer intelligible; only the law of becoming independent is intelligible’.35 The recognition of society as an autonomic economic subject entails its critique.36 What appears in the appearance of society as a movement of real economic abstractions, how is it that ‘the life of all men hangs by’ it,37 and what gives it a consciousness and a will?
Social reproduction governed by ‘real economic abstractions’ entails both chance and necessity, which are experienced as ‘fate’. The mythological idea of fate becomes no less mythical when it is demythologized ‘into a secular “logic of things”’ that on the pain of ruin judges the actions of the actual individuals in cold, exacting ways.38 Such fate is a category of a ghostlike society.39 Its secret is, however, not some invisible hand that regulates the economic development. Rather, and as argued since Marx, what manifests itself ‘behind the backs of the acting subjects . . . is their own work’,40 and it is their own work that endows the cold society of economic reason with a will and that condemns them as economic ‘character masks’ (Adorno) or ‘personifications of economic categories’ (Marx).41 That is, ‘the social relations . . . do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as material (dinglich) relations between persons and social relations between things’.42 Adorno’s conception of dialectics has to be understood against this background. It is to find out what is active in things and holds sway in them, and what holds sway in them asserts itself not only over the social individuals but also through and by means of them.
Negative dialectics refuses ‘to lend itself to sanctioning things as they are’.43 Intended as a theory without ‘affirmative traits’, it purports to demystify rigidified, thing-like, congealed relationships, rendering their immediacy transparent – as socially constituted things that are imbued and endowed with an independent will and consciousness through the social practices of the individuals that act in and through them as personfications of their own social world. For example, Marx writes that in the money fetish, ‘a social relation, a definite relation between individuals . . . appears as a metal, a stone, as a purely physical external thing which can be found, as such, in nature, and which is indistinguishable in form from its natural existence’.44 There is only one world, and that is the world of appearances. What counts is money and money counts only as more money. However, what is appearance an appearance of, and what therefore appears in appearance? The social objectivity of a ‘purely physical thing’ (Marx) that appears in the form of money as incarnation of social wealth, ‘does not lead a life of its own’.45 That is to say, the social relations assume the form of a relationship between things and make themselves manifest as a relationship between money and more money. Society in the form of self-moving economic objects remains social, however perverted in its economic forms of appearance. That is, the social relations vanish in their economic appearance as a relationship between coined metals, and this appearance of the social relations is real. What appears in the appearance of society as a ‘stone’, or a ‘coin’, is thus a definite social relationship between individuals subsisting as a relationship between ‘coins’. In this ‘coined’ relationship the social individuals vanish, only to reappear as personifications of economic reason, some, ‘the owners of money’,46 calculating the movement of economic quantities, winnings and losses, others, the sellers of labour power, labouring for the sake of money as more money, which is the condition of maintaining themselves through sustained wage income.
As argued previously, for Adorno ‘all concepts, even the philosophical ones, refer to non-conceptualities’.47 Say, the economic concept of profit entails what it is not; that is, it entails the definite social relations between individuals as the vanished premise of its economic force. What has vanished cannot be conceptualized. That is, ‘the definite social relations between men themselves . . . assume here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things’ and in this form Man in her social relations appears as a mere character mask of her own social world – a mere price-taking agent, ‘human material’ for ‘money which is worth more money, value which is greater than itself’, capital which begets more capital and which has thus succeeded in avoiding competitive erosion and the threat of bankruptcy ‘through the conquest of social wealth’ by means of the progressive accumulation of the extracted surplus value and therewith the ‘extension of the area of the exploited human material’ that is under its sway.48
The social individuals are not visible in the movement of the economic quantities that govern them – instead of personal relations of domination, capitalist society is ruled by abstractions. Their freedom is a freedom of economic compulsion. What counts is money as more money, on the point of ruin. Their needs and desires are a metaphysical distraction to the calculation of all things economic. Nevertheless, as argued by Marx, this distraction is all-important. Capital is not ‘a very mystic being’ of (economic) nature. It is a very mystic being of a definite form of social relations.49 Critically conceived, then, historical materialism opens ‘up the non-conceptual with the aid of the concept, without reducing it to the concept’.50 That is, it explores the economic concept from within by thinking in and through it, and in this manner it ‘extinguishes the autarky of the concept, strips the blindfold from our eyes. That the concept is a concept even when dealing with things in being does not change the fact that on its part it is entwined with a non-conceptual whole’, that is, the non-conceptuality of Man in her social relations as the vanished premise of the economic object.51
For Adorno, therefore, the traditional notion of historical materialism as a materialism of the historically unfolding forces of production is in its entirety tied to the natural appearance of the existing social relations. Critically conceived, historical materialism is not a metaphysis of an unfolding economic nature that transitions the social relations from mode of production to mode of production, akin to Adam Smith’s fable of the stages of history. Rather, it is critique of the existing relations of economic nature, one that dissolves the dogma of natural economic forces on a social basis. Economic nature is a social nature; it is a nature of the actual relations of life.52 Thus, historical materialism is critique of society in the form of the economic object. It comprehends the forces of production as the forces of historically specific social relations.53 Man vanishes in her economic appearance and her own sensuous practice manifests itself as the practice of sensuous supersensible things that make the world go around not in spite of the social individuals but, rather, in and through, and by means of them.54 What prevails over society exists through society.
Adorno’s dialectics is negative on the condition that it ‘thinks’ against the dazzling spell of the supersensible world of economic objectivity.55 It thinks ‘in contradictions, for the sake of the contradiction once experienced in the thing, and against that contradiction’. It is ‘suspicious of all identity’ and it therefore resists the temptation to identify reified (economic) things.56 What appears in reification? What appears is the social relations in the form of a relationship between economic things. This appearance is as real as the fact that the producers of surplus value depend on the effectiveness of their exploitation, the profitability of their labour, to make a living. Capitalist ‘society stays alive, not despite its antagonism, but by means of it’.57 Truth exists as an existing untruth. The fetishism of commodities does not disguise the ‘real’ social relations. Rather, the fetishism of commodities expresses the ‘real’ social relations. The social individual is governed by the price mechanism, belongs to the price mechanism, acts through the price mechanism as the existing calculus of their social reproduction, and, as the living material of valorization, struggles to make ends meet – as a price taker.
Society in the form of the economic object is bewitched. It is governed by a ghostlike movement of incomprehensible economic quantities. However, their movement does not create the coldness of capitalist society. It represents it and, as such, it presents it to the social individuals. The identity of the bewitched world of the economic categories is entirely abstract. It is governed by the spectre of value, a ghostlike thing that appears in glimpses in the form of money as more money. Just as the critique of religion does not criticize God on the basis of God, the critique of political economy does not criticize real economic abstractions on the basis of real economic abstractions. Rather, the critique of religion deciphers the social relations that assume the form of God and vanish in the idea of God only to reappear as cowed believers in God, mere human derivatives of divine rule. Similarly, the critique of economic objectivity is not a critique from the standpoint of economic nature. Like the critique of religion, it too deciphers the definite social relations that manifest themselves in mysterious, seemingly extra-mundane economic forms and forces that prevail in and through the social individuals as living personifications of their own world that manifests itself in the form of an independent movement of real economic abstractions, which compels them as living means of a process beyond their control. It thus explores the economic concept from within to comprehend the ‘actual relations of life’ that assume the form of value as a thing of ‘nature’.58
The independent movement of the economic forces, of cash, rent and profit, manifests the ‘objective necessity’ of the existing relations of social reproduction, ‘to which we owe everything and that yet [threaten] to bury us all’.59 Adorno’s dialectical theory – like Marx’s – sets out to comprehend the social subject in the form of the reified object. That is, the demystification of society in the form of the economic object is, therefore, more than just a matter of an ad hominem critique of the economic categories.60 It is also a ‘reductio hominis, an insight into the delusion of the subject that will style itself an absolute’.61 What is reified? Appearance [Schein] ‘is the enchantment of the subject in its own world’.62 The essence [Wesen] of society manifests itself in the form of a ‘fatal mischief [Unwesen] of a world that degrades men to means’63 and sets them loose as subjects to struggle to make ends meet, to compete and make profits, and, if need be, to maim and kill. Madness characterizes the mode of reified men, mere personifications of their own social world set loose.
In conclusion, negative dialectics is the presentation of the wrong state of things. It argues that the idea of society as ‘subject to natural laws is ideology if it is hypostasized as immutably given by nature’.64 Instead, it holds that the economic forces find their rational explanation in human social practice and in the comprehension of this practice, however perverted this practice might be in the form of the economic object. It thus argues that the relations of economic objectivity manifest the social nature of an inverted [verkehrte] and perverted [verrückte] world of definite social relations. That is, it amounts ‘to a conceptualised praxis (begriffene Praxis)’ of the capitalist social relations.65 Negative dialectics is the cunning of reason in a bewitched world.
Economic abstraction and class
I have argued that Adorno’s critical theory holds that society in the form of self-moving economic categories is not intelligible. What remains intelligible is the ‘law’ of economic autonomization in the form of objectively valid exchange relations between one economic quantity and another.66 The social relationship disappears in the commodity form, which manifests the vanished social subject as a personification of a spectre of ghost walking economic categories. Exchange value dominates use-value, and exchange value manifests itself in money as the form of value. On the pain of ruin, use-value production has to appear as production for money. Money needs to be made. Everything else is a waste of time, effort, intelligence, productive application and wealth itself. What cannot be transformed into money has no value in exchange and might as well be left to rot. Use-values that have no value in exchange count for nothing and the labour that went into their production is socially speaking invalid and was thus worthlessly expended. What matters is not the satisfaction of needs. What matters is the avoidance of devaluation and bankruptcy through the valorization of capital. The value validity of the expended labour time is of the essence. For the dependent seller of labour power, the consequences are formidable, from increased pressure to make her expenditure of labour count as a socially valid expenditure that assumes the form of money, cutting down on meal-times, speeding up, etc., to wages pressure and loss of employment, weakening the strength of her link to the means of subsistence. The world of value is an inhospitable world. Empathy, human warms and fellow feelings do not make money. Nothing is personal. Everything is just business. On the pain of ruin, money needs to be made. How long a time, then, did this concrete labour take and how much quicker could it have been expended – what is its productivity relative to all other appropriated social labour and what needs to be done to enhance it – to sustain its social validity as a labour of money making? Time is money.
This section argues that the capitalist subject is a value subject of profitable equivalent exchange relations. It expounds the meaning of this last sentence. Exchange is either an exchange between equivalent values or it is profitable; in bourgeois society it is both – a contradiction in terms, which is ‘immanent to [its] reality’.67 What is exchanged and what is the critical category of a profitable equivalence exchange relationship? The section explores the value subject as a class subject and expounds surplus value as the critical category of an equivalent exchange between unequal values.
In Adorno’s argument, the ‘law which determines how the fatality of mankind unfolds itself is the law of exchange’.68 The exchange relations are equivalent exchange relations. Between two equal value-things there is no difference or distinction. That is, ‘[o]ne hundred pounds worth of lead or iron is of as great a value as one hundred pounds worth of silver or gold’.69 The act of an equivalent exchange therefore ‘implies the reduction of the products to be exchanged to their equivalents, to something abstract, but by no means – as traditional discussion would maintain – to something material’.70 The substance of value equivalence cannot be found in ‘the geometrical, physical, chemical or other natural property of commodities. Such properties come into considerations only to the extent that they make the commodities useful, i.e., turn them into use-values’.71 Value equivalence expresses something invisible that is, however, neither divine nor natural in character. Rather, it is an entirely social substance, which becomes visible in the money form.
The traditional idea that money expresses the value of a commodity is uncritical. It supposes value as a substance that is innate to individual commodities. However, the value of a commodity is its social value. Its value is thus a property of exchangeability and money is the independent social form of that property. In clarification, money is not the measure of value. This conception presupposes a pre-monetary existence of value. One hundred pounds of this is the same as one hundred pounds of that. Concrete labour produces this and that. But what labour produces one hundred pounds? Contrary to the traditional theory of value, this or that expenditure of labour does not count. What counts is the social validity of this or that expenditure of labour. Marx conceives of the socially valid labour as abstract labour.72 Whether this or that expenditure of concrete labour represents a socially necessary and therewith valid expenditure of social labour, of abstract labour, becomes clear only in exchange for money. Money is the socially valid form of measurability.73 What cannot be exchanged for money has no value-validity and is thus worthless. It is a failed commodity, which weights like a noose around the necks of those who committed an expenditure of a concrete labour that turned out to be socially unnecessary and is therefore not ‘measurable’ in the form of a certain quantity of money. The logic of abstract labour, of the socially necessary expenditure of labour by the dissociated producers, ‘holds sway in reality (Sache) itself’.74 It is independent from the specific temporalities of the individual expenditures of concrete labour; and yet, results ‘from the actions of the producers’.75 Socially necessary labour time is not fixed and given. It is a fluid category. Its establishment is ‘no greater an abstraction, and is no less real than the resolution of all organic bodies into air’.76 The dynamic of capitalist wealth comprises a ‘social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers’ and yet, it is their work.77
Adorno’s negative dialectics presents the law of value with reference to Marx’s concept of socially necessary labour time. In Adorno’s words, ‘society . . . determined . . . by exchange’ entails an ‘abstract element’ that does not manifest something material in the traditional sense of the word.78 In fact, what is exchanged are ‘average necessary amounts of labour time’.79 This reduction of the product to ‘social labour time [necessarily disregards] the specific forms of the object to be exchanged . . . ; instead they are reduced to a universal unit’.80 Marx’s familiar definition of the social constitution of value – ‘socially necessary labour time is the labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society’ – expresses its social character in the form of a universal commensurability of a time made abstract.81 This time appears as a force of nature – everybody labours to make the cut in time, and then the value validity of the expended labour is effected or denied in exchange. Whether something has value is a matter of exchangeability and measurability, and what is exchanged are equal amounts of socially necessary labour time. In capitalism ‘time is ontologised’.82 This ontologized time is the time of value, and the time of value is the socially necessary labour time – the value-validity of expended labour is like a ghost that either becomes visible in the form of money or it does not, in which case, it becomes visible in the form of a hard-hitting invisible hand.
The holy trinity of social labour, socially necessary labour time and value-validity in exchange is invisible. Its objectivity is spectral. I have argued that the ghostlike objectivity of value becomes visible in the money form. Back in production the ghost of value appears as a Vampire that feeds on living labour as the human material of valorization. Socially necessary labour time is not fixed and given. The labour time that ‘was yesterday undoubtedly socially necessary for the production of a yard of linen, ceases to be so to-day’.83 Whether the concrete expenditure of labour time is a valid, socially necessary expenditure of labour time can only be established post-festum in exchange. On the pain of ruin, the expenditure of living labour is thus done in the hope that it will turn out to be socially necessary and that it will thus achieve value-validity in exchange with money. ‘Time is money’, said Benjamin Franklin, and one might add that therefore money is time. If then, capitalism reduces everything to time, an abstract time that is dissociated from concrete human circumstances and purposes, then, time really is everything. If ‘time is everything, [then] man is nothing; he is, at the most, a time’s carcase’84 – a carcass of ‘personified labour-time’.85 Expenditure of socially valid labour does not occur in in its own good time. It occurs within time, that is the time of value as expenditure of socially necessary labour time. The abstraction of the exchange process ‘lies therefore not in the abstracting mode of though by the sociologist, but in society itself’ (Adorno 2000: 32). Something abstract, intangible and invisible, holds sway in reality and compels its conduct.
Finally turning to the point that the capitalist exchange relations posit the exchange of money for more money as an equivalent exchange between unequal values (M . . . M’), how does money ‘[bring] forth living off springs’?86 What appears in the appearance of an equivalent exchange of money as more money is the ‘difference between the labour-time expended by the worker and that needed for the reproduction of his life’.87 The fundamental relationship is thus between the value of labour power and the value produced by the consumption of labour power during the social working day. The mysterious character of an equivalent exchange of money for more money has thus to do with the transformation of the commodity labour power into a surplus value producing resource (M . . . P . . . M’).88 For the sake of more money, the curtailment of the labour-time spent by the worker to reproduce the value of labour power is of the essence. It is the condition for extending the surplus labour time beyond the time necessary for the (simple) reproduction of society. This extended labour time is the source of the expansion of social wealth, creating a surplus in value, the foundation of profit. The understanding, then, of the mysterious character of an equivalence exchange between unequal values, of money for more money, lies ‘in the concept of surplus value’.89 Adorno thus argues that the equivalence exchange relations are founded ‘on the class relationship’ between the owners of the means of production and the producers of surplus value, and he argues that this social relationship vanishes in its economic appearance as an exchange between one quantity of money for another.90
Economic thought identifies the properties of the economic categories as the revealed truth of society. It recognizes the profitable accumulation of some abstract form of wealth for its own sake as a social necessity. Its identification of profit as a social necessity is not untrue. Failure to make a profit entails great danger. To the vanishing point of death, the life of the sellers of labour power hangs by the success of turning her living labour into a profitable means for its buyer. The profitability of her labour is the fundamental condition of achieving sustained wage-based employment. Yesterday’s profitable appropriation of surplus labour buys the labour power of another Man today, the buyer for the sake of making a profit, so that he avoids bankruptcy by enriching himself, the sellers in order to make a living through wage income.
In Capital, Marx develops the capitalist class relations from the sale of the commodity labour power. In truth, however, ‘the sale of labour power presupposes coercion as the foundation of its sale’.91 The labour market is the institution that regulates the economic compulsion to make ends meet in the form of an equal exchange relationship between the traders in labour power. Behind the freedom of trade stands the free labourer who divorced from the means of subsistence is at liberty to enter into contracts of employment. On the other side of freedom is the daily struggle to secure the means of subsistence through wage income and to curtail the buyer’s acquired right to consume the seller’s labour power no matter what during the contracted hours of work. Freedom appears in the form of the economic compulsion to trade labour power for a wage, and not only that, it appears also in the necessity to produce surplus value for its buyer as the condition of future employment.
The struggle for employment and conditions takes the form of a competition between the sellers of labour power on a global scale.92 For the seller of labour power, competition is not some abstract economic law. Rather, its conceptuality is experienced in the form of precarious labour markets, wage pressure, risk to redundancy, and loss of income. ‘Proletarian language is dictated by hunger’.93 Class society exists in the form of individualized commodity owners, each seeking to maintain themselves in competitive, gendered, racialized, and territorialized labour markets where the term ‘cutthroat competition’ is experienced in various forms, from arson attack to class solidarity, and from destitution to collective bargaining, from gangland thuggery to communal forms of organizing subsistence-support, from strike-breaking to collective action, nationalist flag-waiving to international solidarity strikes.
For the science of economic matter, the unemployed represent an economic zero since they lack both in productive contribution and effective demand. This economic calculation of the unemployed is not untrue. It makes clear that the life of the traders of labour power really ‘hangs by’ the profitability extraction of surplus value.94 Labouring for the sake of a surplus in value is innate to the concept of the worker. She belongs to a system of wealth in which her labouring existence has a utility only as a means of surplus value extraction. Her subsistence depends on the profitability of her living labour.
Contrary to a whole tradition of Marxist theory, and critical theory too, from Habermas to Honneth and from Fraser to Jaeggi,95 the social relations of production do not harbour within themselves a ‘progressivist’ resolution through schemes of communicative action, recognition or application of Marxian economics. They harbour within themselves the requirement of surplus value extraction from the living labour of dispossessed workers. Surplus value extraction is the condition of social reproduction in capitalist society. Unprofitable buyers of labour power go out of business; profitable ones maintain demand for labour power. The profitable accumulation of yesterday’s yield of surplus value is the condition of today’s wage-based access to the means of subsistence. The dispossessed surplus value producers do not struggle for abstract ideas. They struggle to make a living and they work for profit.
Looking on the bright side of the wronged world
I have argued that economic reproduction is social reproduction. It takes place ‘in and through’ the perverted ‘totality’ of the social relations of economic objectivity that feed on the surplus value producing labour of a class of dispossessed workers.96 For Adorno, ‘the organic nature of capitalist society is both an actuality and at the same time a socially necessary illusion. The illusion signifies that within this society laws can only be implemented as natural processes over people’s heads, while their validity arises from the form of the relations of production within which production takes place.’97
Adorno’s critical theory holds that the forces of production do not manifest some economic nature. Rather, they manifest ‘congealed relationships, which have become autonomous, objectified vis-à-vis human beings’.98 He thus rejects the orthodox conception of a dialectics between the forces of production as some trans-historically active economic nature and the historically specific relations of production as a ‘perverter of Marxian motives’. He criticizes it as a ‘metaphysics’ which conceives of history as a ‘basic ontological structure of things in being’,99 in which, as Patrick Murray puts it, the ‘“forces of production” are not social-form-determined but, on the contrary, are the ultimate determinant of the “relations of production”’.100 The traditional view not only naturalizes the economic categories. It also, Adorno argues, denies the ‘spontaneity of the subject, a movens of the objective dialectics of the forces and relations of production’.101 In his understanding the forces of production manifest ‘“relationships between human beings and not, as they appear to us, the properties of things”’.102 What therefore appears in the appearance of society as an object of the economic forces is not some general economic nature that imposes itself behind the backs of the individuals. Rather, what appears are the actual social relations in the form of independent economic forces. Economic abstractions as such do not exist, except as a negative ontology of ‘perverted’ (verrückte) social relations.
The reality in which the social individuals move day in and day out has no invariant character, that is, something which exists independently from them. As a critical theory of society, and as argued here with reference to Alfred Schmidt,103 the critique of political economy amounts to a conceptualized social praxis in the form of the economic object, that is, the entire meaning of the ‘relations of production resides precisely in the fact that we are here concerned not with direct action but, if you like, congealed action, or with some form of congealed labour’ or with society in the form of independent economic forces.104 Economic nature is a social nature. Its reality is immanent to its own social context.
The crucial category of economic objectivity is the concept of surplus value as ‘the invisible and unknown essence’ of profit.105 It is produced by a class of dispossessed sellers of labour power whose access to the means of subsistence depends on the profitability of their living labour. Surplus value is the difference between the value of the commodity labour power and the total value extracted from its consumption during the social working day. To be an unexploitable worker is a fate much worse than being an exploited worker. How to make a living without wage-income? What can be traded if labour-power can’t – how many for organ sales? The producers of surplus value belong to a world that is ‘hostile to the subject’ and the equivalent exchange relations between the buyers of labour power and its sellers presuppose coercion in the conceptuality of social freedom and equality.106 Bourgeois society does not contain within itself the promise of freedom from want. Rather, it contains within itself dispossessed producers of surplus value who struggle to dodge the ‘freedom to starve’ as personifications of surplus labour time.107
Adorno’s dictum that ‘society remains class struggle’ does not express something positive or desirable.108 His negative dialectics of the false society resists the bright side view. It holds that ‘the abolition of hunger [requires] a change in the relations of production’.109
Notes
This chapter emerged from various earlier drafts that appeared in English in History of the Human Science 29, no. 2 (2016): 60–76; in Spanish in Constelaciones 8, no. 8–9 (2016): 3–27; and in Korean in Jinbo-Pyŏnglon, 71 (2017): 269–305.
1 According to Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (London: University of California Press, 1973), 152, ‘Horkheimer and Adorno, however broad the scope of their interests and knowledge, were never really serious students of economics, Marxist or otherwise’. According to Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles, translated by Fredrick G. Lawrence (London: Heinemann), 1983, 109, ‘Adorno was not bothered with political economy.’
2 The question is Marx’s, see his ‘The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof’, in Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, translated by Ben Fowkes (London, Penguin, 1990), 163–77.
3 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, translated by E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1990), 11.
4 Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems, translated by Edmund Jephcott, edited by Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge: Polity, 2001).
5 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Sociology and Empirical Research’, in The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, edited by Theodor W. Adorno, Hans Albert, Ralf Dahrendorf, Jürgen Habermas, Harald Pilot and Karl Popper, translated by Glyn Adey and David Frisby (London: Heinemann, 1976), 68–86, here 80.
6 Following Simon Clarke, Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology (London: Palgrave, 1992), traditional Marxist conceptions of class are fundamentally Smithean in origin. See also the contributions to Ana Cecelia Dinerstein and Mike Neary, The Labour Debate (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).
7 See also Charlotte Baumann’s contribution to this volume; and Matthias Benzer, ‘Social Critique in the Totally Socialized Society’, Philosophy & Social Criticism 37, no. 5 (2011): 575–603.
8 Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, translated by Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge: Polity, 1986).
9 On Habermas’ critical theory, see Christopher Henning, ‘Jürgen Habermas: Against Obstacles in Public Debates’, in The Sage Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, edited by Beverley Best, Werner Bonefeld and Chris O’Kane (London: Sage, 2018), 402–16, and Helmut Reichelt, ‘Jürgen Habermas’ Reconstruction of Historical Materialism’, in The Politics of Change, translated by William Martin and Joseph Fracchia, edited by Werner Bonefeld and Kosmas Psychopedis (London: Palgrave, 2000), 105–45.
10 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in idem, Illuminations, translated by Harry Zorn, edited by Hannah Arendt (London: Pimlico, 1999) 245–55, here 246.
11 Axel Honneth, The Pathologies of Individual Freedom, translated by Ladislaus Löb (Cambridge MA: Princeton University Press, 2010), 10.
12 As discussed by Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth in their Redistribution or Recognition (London: Verso, 2013).
13 It might of course be the case that Honneth’s idea of ‘freedom’ does not include the freedom from want. If that were to be the case, his freedom does not promise very much, if anything at all. On Honneth’s theory of recognition, see Richard Gunn and Adrian Wilding, Revolutionary Recognition (London: Bloomsbury, 2021) and Michael J. Thompson ‘Axel Honneth and Critical Theory’, in The Sage Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory (London: Sage, 2018), 564–584.
14 Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures, 1964–1965, translated by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 51.
15 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 304.
16 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Society’, in Critical Theory and Society, edited by Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas Kellner (London: Routledge, 1990), 267–275, here 272.
17 Max Horkheimer, ‘Kritische und Traditionelle Theorie’, in Max Horkheimer, Kritische und Traditionelle Theorie (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1992), 205–59, here 229. Translations from German original sources are by the author.
18 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 196.
19 Max Horkheimer, ‘Nachtrag’, in idem, Kritische und Traditionelle Theorie, 261–70.
20 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia. Reflections from Damaged Life, translated by Edmund Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 156.
21 Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 141. Even Weber’s concern about the relationship of economy to society has vanished from contemporary sociology. For Weber, this relationship is a central sociological problem. His sociology does however not conceptualize the economic categories as historically specific forms of social reproduction. He rather keeps them separate, views them as distinct spheres of action, and analyses their interrelationships. These points paraphrase Adorno’s argument in Introduction to Sociology. On Adorno’s sociology, see Matthias Benzer, The Sociology of Theodor Adorno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
22 Ibid., 67.
23 On economics as a science of ‘incomprehensible concepts’, see Joan Robinson, Economic Philosophy. An Essay on the Progress of Economic Thought (London: Watts, 1962). 88. Hans-Georg Backhaus, ‘Some Aspects of Marx’s Concept of Critique in the Context of his Economic-Philosophical Theory’, in Human Dignity: Social Autonomy and the Critique of Capitalism, edited by Werner Bonefeld and Kosmas Psychopedis (London: Routledge, 2017), 13–29, and Werner Bonefeld, Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 21–51.
24 Dirk Braunstein, Adornos Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011), 10. See also the contribution by Nico Bobka and Dirk Braunstein to this volume.
25 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, xix.
26 Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, 144.
27 See Marx, Capital, chaps 4 and 5. For a critical theory of capitalist wealth see, for example, Beverley Best, Marx and the Dynamic of Capital Formation (London: Palgrave, 2010); Simon Clarke, Marx’s Theory of Crisis (London: Macmillan, 1994); Michael Heinrich, Die Wissenschaft vom Wert (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2017); Patrick Murray, The Mismeasure of Wealth (Chicago: Haymarket, 2018); and Maximiliano Tomba, Marx’s Temporalities (Chicago: Haymarket, 2014).
28 Adorno, History and Freedom, 118.
29 Adorno, Negative Dialectics 198.
30 Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, 67.
31 Ibid., 145.
32 Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, 84, 141.
33 Marx, Capital, 494, fn. 4.
34 The mistake, says Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 149, ‘in traditional thinking is that identity is taken for the goal’. What is identified and what does the identity of an economic quantity identify? It identifies quantitative differences. Identity thinking affirms what negative dialectics dissolves – the autarky of the socio-economic object as a thing in itself.
35 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Introduction’, The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, 1–67, here 15.
36 Contrary to the argument attempted here, Christian Lotz, The Capitalist Schemata (London: Lexington), 2014, 22, holds that Adorno ‘identifies capitalism with the exchange principle’ and that he therefore did not conceptualise the class-divided character of the capitalist social relations. The focus on the exchange principle was key to the New Reading of Marx in (West-)Germany. Helmut Reichelt, Die Neue Marx Lektüre (Hamburg: VSA, 2008). On the new reading, see Ingo Elbe, ‘Helmut Reichelt and the New Reading of Marx’, translated by Jacob Blumenfeld, The Sage Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, 367–85; Ricardo Bellofiore and Tommaso R. Riva, ‘Hans-Georg Backhaus: The Critique of Premonetary Theories of Value and the Perverted Form of Economic Reality’, ibid., 386–401; and Elena Lange, ‘Moishe Postone: Marx’s Critique of Political Economy as Immanent Social Critique’, ibid., 514–32. In the case of Adorno, the exchange principle was understood as a real social abstraction. However, and surprisingly so, the form of the abstraction, that is the money form, was not discussed at all. On real abstraction and the money form of wealth, see Frank Engster, Das Geld als Maß, Mittel und Methode (Berlin: Neofelis, 2014) for a comprehensive, though convoluted, account. On Postone’s critique of the economic object, see also Chris O’Kane and Kirstin Munro, in this volume. On Adorno’s critique of the capitalist exchange relations, see also Charles Prusik, Adorno and Neoliberalism (London: Bloomsbury, 2020) and his contribution to this volume.
37 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 320.
38 Ibid., 319.
39 On the invisible character of ‘economic’ value, its appearance in the money form, and on the labour that produces it see Riccardo Bellofiore, ‘A Ghost Turning into a Vampire’, in Re-reading Marx: New Perspectives after the Critical Edition, edited by Riccardo Bellofiore and Renato Fineschi (London: Palgrave, 2009), 178–94; Werner Bonefeld, ‘Abstract Labour: Against Its Nature and on Its Time’, Capital & Class, 34, no. 2 (2010), 257–76.
40 Herbert Marcuse, Negations (London: Free Association Press, 1988), 151.
41 Adorno, ‘Sociology and Empirical Research’, 78; Marx, Capital, 92.
42 Marx, Capital, 166.
43 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 159.
44 Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1973), 239.
45 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On the Logic of the Social Sciences’, in The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, edited by Theodor W. Adorno, Hans Albert, Ralf Dahrendorf, Jürgen Habermas, Harald Pilot and Karl Popper, translated by Glyn Adey and David Frisby (London: Heinemann, 1976), 105–22, here 107.
46 Marx, Capital, 270.
47 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 11.
48 Marx, Capital, 165, 740, 257, 739–40.
49 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1966), 837.
50 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 65.
51 Ibid., 12.
52 The actual relations of life are the non-conceptual premise of the economic categories. On this, see Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 493–4, fn. 4.
53 According to Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 197, ‘Horkheimer’s phrasing “critical theory” . . . seeks not to make materialism acceptable but to use it to make men theoretically conscious of what it is that distinguishes materialism – distinguishes it from amateurish explications of the world as much as from the “traditional theory” of science’.
54 See Marx, Capital, 165. For an exposition of Marx’s notion of sensuous supersensible practice, see Helmut Reichelt, ‘Social Reality as Appearance: Some Notes on Marx’s Conception of Reality’, in Human Dignity, edited by Bonefeld and Psychopedis (London: Routledge, 2017), 31–67.
55 Of course, ‘it’, critical theory, does not think. We do. On real abstraction and forms of thought, see Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Warenform und Denkform (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978). For a critical theory of real abstraction, see the contributions by Ingo Elbe, Chris O’Kane and Patrick Murray to Antonio Oliva, Angel Oliva and Ivan Novara (eds.), Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory (Palgrave: London, 2020).
56 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 145.
57 Ibid., 320.
58 Marx, Capital, 494, fn. 4. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 355.
59 Ibid., 55.
60 Adorno, ‘On the Logic of the Social Sciences’, 121.
61 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 186.
62 Theodor Adorno, Stichworte, Kritische Modelle 2 (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1969), 159.
63 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 167.
64 Ibid., 355.
65 Alfred Schmidt, ‘Praxis’, in Gesellschaft: Beiträge zur Marxschen Theorie 2 (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 264–308, here 207. On critical theory as a critique of capitalist socialization (Vergesellschaftung) see Lars Heitmann, ‘“Totality”: On the Negative-Dialectical Presentation of Capitalist Socialisation’, in The Sage Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, translated by Jacob Blumenfeld, 589–606; and Patrick Murray, ‘Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy’, ibid., 764–82.
66 See Adorno, ‘Introduction’, 15.
67 Adorno, ‘Sociology and Empirical Research’, 80.
68 Ibid.
69 Marx, Capital, 127–8.
70 Adorno, ‘Social and Empirical Research’, 80.
71 Marx, Capital, 139.
72 For an exposition, see Werner Bonefeld, ‘Wealth and Suffering’, Dialogue and Universalism, 28, no. 3 (2018), 123–40.
73 See Chris Arthur, ‘Value and Money’, in Marx’s Theory of Money, edited by, Fred Moseley (London: Palgrave, 2005), 111–23.Werner Bonefeld, ‘Capital Par Excellence: On Money as an Obscure Thing’, Estudios de Filosofía, 62 (2020), 33–56.
74 Adorno, ‘Sociology and Empirical Research’, 80.
75 Moishe Postone, Time, Labour and Social Domination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 191, also 215.
76 Karl Marx, Contribution toward a Critique of Political Economy, MECW 29 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1987), 272.
77 Marx, Capital, 135.
78 Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, 31, 80.
79 Ibid., 31.
80 Ibid., 32.
81 Marx, Capital, 129.
82 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 331.
83 Marx, Capital, 202.
84 Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, MECW 6 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), 127.
85 Marx, Capital, 525–53.
86 Ibid., 255.
87 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 73.
88 M . . . P . . . M’ and M . . . M’ are classical expressions for first, the transformation of Money into the Production of essentially surplus value that is realised in exchange in the form of a greater amount of Money that expresses the extracted surplus value in the form of profit. Second, M . . . M’, which is the general formula of capital, money making, expresses the exchange relationship between Money and more Money, say, £100 [M] = £120 [M’].
89 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Seminar Mitschrift von 1962’, Appendix to Hans-Georg Backhaus, Die Dialektik der Wertform (Freiburg: Ça Ira, 1997), 501–13, here 508. See also Chris O’Kane’s important introduction to this text by Adorno, both published here in the Appendix.
90 Ibid., 506.
91 Adorno, cited in Braunstein, Adornos Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, 217.
92 See, for example, Werner Bonefeld, ‘The Spectre of Globalisation’, in The Politics of Change, edited by Werner Bonefeld and Kosmas Psychopedis (London: Palgrave, 2000), 31–68. Tony Smith, Globalisation: A Systematic Account (Leiden: Brill, 2005).
93 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 102.
94 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 320.
95 Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi, Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 2018).
96 Adorno, History and Freedom, 47.
97 Ibid., 118.
98 Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, 82.
99 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 358.
100 Patrick Murray, ‘Marx’s “Truly Social” Labour Theory of Value’, Historical Materialism, 6, no. 1 (2000), 27–65, here 64, fn. 21.
101 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 205. Translation amended.
102 Adorno quoting Marx, Introduction to Sociology, 82.
103 Schmidt, ‘Praxis’.
104 Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, 105.
105 Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 43.
106 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 167.
107 Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, 201.
108 Adorno, ‘Society’, 272.
109 Adorno, ‘Introduction’, 62.