The liquidation of the individual as a critique of political economy
For Theodor W. Adorno, the historical emergence of the waged-worker and the capitalist marks not just the economic roles of the principal classes of modern society but also heralds ‘the individual’ as a new anthropological type. Hardly older than the Italian Renaissance, the individual coalesces new qualities of ‘self-responsibility, foresight, self-sufficiency, as well as a rigid compulsion of conscience and an internalized bond to authority’.1 If, as Adorno argues, the ‘individual owes its crystallization to forms of political economy, especially the urban marketplace [Marktwesen]’, it seems that the dissolution of these forms would auger the same for the individual.2 With the reorganization of capitalism at the turn of the twentieth century, ‘competition and the market economy [Marktwirtschaft]’ began to cede their coordinating functions to conglomerates of monopoly capital and to state forms oriented to managing economic crises and integrating the proletariat. These economic changes brought forth what Adorno calls ‘the anthropological transformations under late industrial mass culture’ wherein human beings become ‘mere receptive apparatuses’ and ‘nodal points of conditioned reflexes’.3 With these changes, however, it seems that even the faint promise buoyed by the ideology of the bourgeois individual drifts beyond all hope of rescue. ‘The concept of the individual, historically originated, reaches its historical limit.’ 4
For the second- and third-generation Frankfurt School, the meaning and implications of Adorno’s assessment are unambiguous: the individual exists in name only, leaving Adorno to elegize the bourgeois individual as one of its last representatives. While other commentators rightly point out that this liquidation does not amount to a deformation but to an anthropological transformation,5 interpretations following Jürgen Habermas have emphasized decline. The dead-end of such a ‘relentless pessimism’ has been understood as the inevitable outcome of the abiding influence of the ‘state capitalism thesis’ on Adorno’s thought.6 According to this reading, if monopoly capital and the interventionist state effectively abolish the market, the structural contradictions of the capitalist economy would no longer be central for a theory of society. With the market made obsolete, so too the bourgeois norm of individualism and the possibility of its immanent critique. The upshot of Adorno’s thesis, according to Axel Honneth, leaves ‘the individual a helpless victim’ at the mercy of ‘the calculated interests of the major corporations and the planning capacity of the state organs’.7
Despite the influence of the subsequent generations of the Frankfurt school on the reception of Adorno’s work, such interpretations remain one-sided. No matter how withering or even pessimistic Adorno’s remarks may appear at first glance, the movement of his analysis never halts at an abstract negation. In Adorno’s own words: ‘to think that the individual is being liquidated without a trace is over-optimistic’. Liquidation ‘does not take the form of a radical elimination of what existed previously’. Instead, individuality persists by being ‘dragged along dead, neutralized and impotent as ignominious ballast’.8 While Adorno leaves no doubt that ‘the socialization of society has enfeebled and undermined’ the individual, he also claims that within this same process ‘the individual has gained as much in richness, differentiation, and vigor’.9 This contradictory status of the individual does not foreclose immanent critique but demands it. Indeed, as Adorno puts it, ‘[i]n the age of the individual’s liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew’.10 The related claim that Adorno’s theory reflects the one-dimensionality of the state capitalism thesis – an effective revocation of the critique of political economy – is equally dubious.11 According to Adorno, the individual persists in the process of its liquidation because the form of its self-preservation continues to require the human being to function as an ‘agent of value’.12
It is through the critique of political economy that we can better track how Adorno’s critical analysis of the contradictory status of the individual seeks not to eulogize but to redeem or rescue its promise. In this chapter, I argue that Adorno’s thesis of the ‘liquidation of the individual’ develops the critique of political economy as a critical social theory. A cluster of meanings present themselves in the liquidation thesis, which can be hewn into three closely related moments within a larger contradictory whole: i) individuality as a means of self-preservation, ii) individuation as a mode of social conformity, and iii) the fungibility of every individual. The first two moments elucidate the transformation of bourgeois individuality as an anthropological type. Under existing conditions, the preservation of the self withers and fragments the individual subject, who increasingly conforms to pre-established patterns in an effort to adapt to the exigencies of capital. The third moment – the fungibility of the individual – entails the liquidation of actually living individuals, or what Marx calls the production of a ‘surplus population’. While each moment appears within seemingly different spheres of social life, the expositional separation presented below is strictly heuristic. As will be evident, these moments of the individual’s liquidation are unified by a shared basis in the capitalist form and organization of labour and the subordination of the human being to the ‘regulative law’ of socially necessary labour-time.
After introducing the three moments of the liquidation of the individual below, we turn to Marx’s critique of political economy to show the continuity between the liquidation of the individual as anthropological type and what I call the liquidation of ‘actually-living individuals’. While it will be shown that Adorno sets up this transition by linking fungibility to its social basis in the universal commensurability of abstract labour-time, he does not explicitly connect this insight to capital’s tendency to render labour superfluous in the form of human beings. Instead, Adorno somewhat vaguely detects this inversion in the pervasive suspicion that ‘[e]veryone knows that he could become superfluous [überflüssig] as technology develops as long as production is only carried out for production’s sake’.13 To better substantiate Adorno’s insights, part II of this chapter turns to Marx’s concept of ‘socially necessary labor-time’ as the ‘law of value’ which reveals how capital distinguishes between social ‘necessity’ and social ‘superfluity’, or waste. This distinction extends to human beings in the production of a ‘surplus population’, an outcome of what Marx calls the ‘changing organic composition of capital’. After assessing the contributions and shortcomings of Adorno and Marx on the related immiseration thesis in part III, the final section considers how the developmental tendencies in the productivity of labour-time suggest possibilities for the emancipation of the individual, which can occur only in an emancipated society, i.e. a society not controlled by labour-time but ‘in control of itself’. The chapter closes by considering how Adorno’s critique of ‘objectively untrue’ yet ‘real conceptualities’ discloses not just what is promised by the concept of the individual but also what can be redeemed from the ‘real untruth’ of the superfluity and fungibility theorized as the liquidation of the individual.
I. Liquidation of the individual
As described at the outset of this chapter, Adorno’s thesis of the ‘liquidation of the individual’ first presents itself as an anthropological transformation emerging from the historical dissolution of the bourgeois individual. As capital continues to reorganize the labour process according to the demands of ceaseless self-valorization (what Marx calls the ‘real subsumption of labor under capital’), the individual proves to be increasingly incompatible with self-preservation. Under the conditions of advanced capitalism, the preservation of the self turns out to wither the individual subject as it effaces its own individuality by conforming to pre-established patterns in reflex-like adaptation. Echoing Marx’s insight that life as simply a means to life becomes a lifeless thing, Adorno underscores the stark contrast between the potential of individuality and its disfigurement when yoked to self-preservation.14 As merely a means, and therefore a by-product of self-preservation, the prevailing form of individuality experiences ‘the possibility of sustaining one’s life’ as its freedom.15 Such ‘freedom’ to pursue one’s own needs amounts to the ‘cover-image of the total social necessity, which compels the individual towards ruggedness, so that it survives’.16 Under prevailing social conditions, individuality has been made inessential for the survival of a living-individual: ‘self-preservation annuls life in subjectivity’.17
The subordination of individuality to the preservation of the self entails a second moment of its liquidation as individuation by means of social conformity. To be sure, the critique of conformism comprises some of the better-known features of Adorno’s analysis of the culture industry and mass consumption. For instance, Adorno describes the ‘pseudo-individuality’ of consumer choice, wherein individuals mistake as their own acts of choosing what really is chosen for them on the basis of the increasing standardized differentiation of cultural products for consumption.18 Yet, it would be a mistake to consider conformism as ‘merely’ subjective, psychological, or cultural. The compulsion to conform emanates from the form and organization of labour in capitalism. This objective basis comes into focus if we keep in mind that the ultimate criterion of self-preservation in a capitalist society is the individual’s ‘successful or unsuccessful adaptation to the objectivity of their function and the schema assigned to it’.19 The necessity to seek out and fulfil a function in the social division of labour cuts across the class dimensions of capitalist society in that individuals must preserve themselves either through the successful sale of their labour power or by acting as ‘capital personified’ by carrying out the logic of endless accumulation. The reproduction of capitalist society as a whole depends on the fulfilment of these functions, in which the form of social organization reduces human-beings to ‘bearers’ [Träger] of objectified social relations. Whether proletarian or bourgeois, individuals ‘must mold themselves to the technical apparatus body and soul’.20
Just as self-preservation remains tethered to the labour process as it becomes all the more subsumed under capital, Adorno consistently explains the hallmarks of conformity as adapting, adjusting, submitting, and ultimately identifying with one’s function within the capitalist social division of labour. Marx articulates this objective compulsion to conform most strikingly in his analysis of large-scale industry, wherein the worker must ‘learn to adapt his own movements to the uniform and unceasing motion of an automaton’.21 Adorno extends this analysis by tracing this compulsion from the detailed division of labour in the factory to the social division of labour in capitalist society:
People are still what they were in Marx’s analysis in the middle of the nineteenth century: appendages of the machine, not just literally workers who have to adapt themselves to the nature of the machines they use, but far beyond that, figuratively, workers who are compelled right down to their most intimate impulses to subordinate themselves to the mechanisms of society and to adopt specific social roles without reservation. Today, as in the past, production is for the sake of profit.22
Here, Adorno indicates that not only can the social roles of individuals be deduced from their ‘individuated function in the modern economy as mere agents of value’, but also their ‘inner constitution’.23 The individual must mould themselves according to their social function within the division of labour while also expressing gratitude so far as this function lasts – social conformity aims to create an ‘atmosphere of social contentment’.24
Just as capital must concern itself with the particular qualitative dimensions of production only insofar as they are relevant for producing surplus-value, so too is the worker ‘required to be capable of the same flexibility or versatility in the way he applies his labor’.25 Marx arrives at this insight by tracing how proletarian labour becomes increasingly less specialized, which means that workers must in principle conform to any specific concrete tasks assigned to their functions within the whole. So central is this objective compulsion to conform to one’s function, that it renders all feats of ‘adaptation, all acts of conformity described by social psychology and cultural anthropology’ as ‘mere epiphenomena’.26 In this light we can understand why Adorno chides the conservative complaints about the ‘mechanization of man’. Such an idea assumes a dualistic opposition of individual and society in which the individual is conceived either as a residuum of pure subjectivity or as deformed by social objectivity that remains external to it.27 Neither side of this dualism grasps the ‘individual’ as itself an historical product of capitalist society. In other words, society ‘realizes itself through the interaction of the individuals’ who produce it, while the ‘substance’ of those producers is itself ‘essentially’ already society.28 By bemoaning the individual’s ‘inauthenticity, hypocrisy, and narrow egoism’, conservative individualism ‘blames the hypostatized individual for his fungibility and his existence as a “character-mask” of society rather than as a real self’.29 Conformity is not a function of an individual’s incapacity or indolent unwillingness to develop an independent or autonomous individuality. Rather, ‘[i]t is the concrete conditions of labor in society which enforce conformism – not the conscious influences which additionally render the oppressed stupid and deflect them from the truth’.30 In short, individuals tend to conform by virtue of the objective threat of being impoverished, ostracized or even annihilated via forced economic exclusion.31
If this ‘fear of unemployment’32 helps explain why individuals willingly participate in the dissolution of their own individuality through self-effacing self-preservation and relentless conformity, the objective basis of that fear brings us to the third moment of liquidation: the fungibility of every individual.33 As the mutual interchangeability of things identical in kind, fungibility inheres within the exchange of commodities. Given the centrality and ubiquity of exchange in capitalist society, fungibility not only encompasses the products of labour taking the commodity-form but swallows potentially all objects, and, to the extent we can call ourselves ‘subjects’, individual human beings. The fungible individual contradicts the historically emergent idea of the ‘individual’ as a human being with a unique character and special potentialities.34 Despite the failure of liberalism to make such an idea a reality, this concept of ‘individual’ still held the unfulfilled promise that every human being could also determine themselves as individuals up through the mid-nineteenth century. However, the fungibility of every individual, which follows from the ongoing real subsumption of labour under capital, threatens to dissolve what the concept ‘individual’ promises by making every individual identical (and therefore interchangeable and replaceable) with every other individual. In their Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer explain: ‘Through the mediation of total society, which encompasses all relationships and impulses, human beings are being turned back into precisely what the developmental law of society, the principle of the self, had opposed: mere examples of the species, identical to one another through isolation within the compulsively controlled collectivity.’35 While the context of this passage concerns the destruction of experience as a ‘new form of blindness’, its source is clearly the work process insofar as it standardizes and makes fungible not just intellectual faculties but the workers themselves.
This all-encompassing mediation that constitutes bourgeois society as a totality becomes refined and restated in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics as the ‘exchange-principle, the reduction of human labor to an abstract universal concept of average labor-time’.36 Here, Adorno indicates that the objective social basis of the ‘fungibility of the individual’ is to be found in the value character of capitalist production. To understand how such fungibility amounts to what I call the liquidation of ‘actually-living individuals’, we need to develop Adorno’s insight with reference to Marx. From the perspective of the valorization process, the individual as wage worker is by definition absolutely fungible: the worker counts only as a source of labour-time, the expenditure of which can produce value. As Marx writes, the ‘labor-time expressed in exchange-value is the labor-time of an individual, but of an individual in no way different from the next individual and from all other individuals in so far as they perform equal labor’. Indeed, Marx adds, ‘it is quite immaterial whose labor-time it is’ in the production of commodities.37 As we will explore in the next section, what ‘counts’ or is ‘valid’ [Geltung] is the labour-time expended in production in abstraction from the concrete characteristics of labour and the labouring subject. Marx sums up the temporal basis of human fungibility as inherent in the production of value in his Poverty of Philosophy: ‘[O]ne should not say that one hour of a man is worth [vaut] one hour of another man, [but] a man of one hour is worth [vaut] another man of one hour.’ As an appendage of the machine, the human being ‘counts’ only as a source of objectified time, or ‘at most’, a ‘carcass of time’ [carcasse du temps].38
II. Value validity, socially necessary labour-time and surplus population
Above, we examined the liquidation of the individual from the standpoint of its anthropological transformations as it adapts to the imperatives of the capitalist production process. The centrality of the form and organization of labour specific to capitalism, which undergirds these changes, turned our attention to the value-character of the fungibility of the individual as the third moment of its liquidation. In the section below, we continue to trace how the preponderance of labour-time over its human basis in the organization of capital begins to explain the ease at which fungibility passes over into superfluity. Although labour-time serves as the measure of the magnitude of value, not all expended labour-time is value producing; rather, it is only labour-time which ‘proves’ [gilt] to be ‘socially necessary’ that produces value. In fact, a great deal of labour-time expended in the production of material wealth can ‘prove’ to be ‘wasted time’ if it fails to valorize value. And insofar as the human being counts as a mere ‘carcass of time’, capital makes no distinction between wasted labour-time and human beings as waste. Within the logic of ‘validating’ labour-time as ‘socially necessary’, a surplus of labour-capacity appears as a surplus of human beings. The liquidation of the individual culminates in what I have called ‘the liquidation of actually-living individuals’, or what Marx theorizes as the ‘surplus population’.
To understand how socially necessary labour-time functions as the heteronomous logic that distinguishes between necessity and superfluity, let us recall the peculiar differences Marx uncovers between wealth and value. Whatever its social form, use-value expresses ‘the material content of wealth independent of the amount of labor required to appropriate its useful qualities’. The quantity and quality of use-values are neither necessarily a function of labour, nor measured by the amount of labour-time expended in their production.39 Value, on the other hand, is the specific social form of wealth in capitalist society wherein its substance is labour alone (as abstract labour) and its magnitude is measured by socially necessary labour-time.40 Therefore, value is not measured simply by the abundance and quality of useful things but solely by what Marx calls the expenditure of ‘socially necessary labor-time’. By producing at rates faster than socially necessary, it is possible for individual producers to create ‘in equal periods of time greater values than average social labor of the same kind’. The ‘law of the determination of value by labor-time’ – while appearing as the ‘coercive law of competition . . . makes itself felt to the individual capitalist who applies the new method of production . . . by compelling him to sell his goods under their social value’ and ‘forc[ing] his competitors to adopt the new method’. Yet ‘this extra surplus-value vanishes as soon as the new method of production is generalized’.41 Since socially necessary labour-time is a rate which determines what ‘counts’ or is validated as socially necessary, it acts as a ‘regulative law of nature’ in determining the magnitude of value in the same way as does ‘the law of gravity asserts itself when a person’s house collapses on top on him’.42
Socially necessary labour-time measures not the time of individual producers but that of ‘social labor’. However, what counts as social labour is neither predetermined, nor fully known by producers in advance. For the private labour expended in the production of commodities to be validated as social labour, it must prove to be a valid expenditure of labour-time that is socially necessary. A crucial moment of this validation occurs in exchange as the transformation of a commodity’s value into a universal equivalent (the money-form). Prior to the sale, the value of the commodity as social labour-time exists ‘in a latent state so to speak’ because the ‘point of departure is not the labor of individuals considered as social labor, but on the contrary, the particular kinds of labor of private individuals . . . which proves [gilt] that it is universal social labor’. Therefore, Marx adds: ‘Universal social labor is consequently not a ready-made prerequisite but an emerging result.’43 Therefore, what counts as ‘socially necessary’ is not a product of planning but determined ‘post-festum’ whereby the surplus value expressed in the surplus product is transformed into the money-form.44 While the transformation of the value congealed in a commodity into the money-form entails an exchange, value is not constituted by the act of selling a commodity for a price determined by market mechanisms in the sphere of circulation.45
According to Marx, that which exerts itself in the form of effective demand is ultimately the preponderance of the temporal determination of value itself. We can see this mechanism at work in the validation process. If a number of commodities remains unsold even though they were produced according to what had been anticipated as the time socially necessary for their production, this estimate can (and often does) prove to be wrong. The failure of these commodities to sell amounts to a failure of validation, which reveals, according to Marx, that too much labour time was expended on their production: ‘If the market cannot stomach the quantity [of linen] at the normal price of 2 shillings a yard, this proves [gilt] that too great a portion of the total social labor-time has been expended in the form of weaving. The effect is the same as if each individual weaver had expended more labor-time on his particular product than was socially-necessary.’ 46 In other words, the labour expended has proven to be socially unnecessary, wasteful, and therefore redundant. If a commodity cannot be sold, it proves not to be a valid expenditure of social labour and therefore possesses no value despite absolutely no changes to its useful qualities as material wealth. Value is not ‘embodied’ within commodities simply because they are products of labour. Products of labour are embodiments of value only insofar as they are commodities: useful things produced to be sold. Only by exchange can these commodities prove [gelten] they embody value. Yet, exchange does not constitute value but validates [gilt] the allocation of already expended social labour time.
This process of validation yields a disturbing implication. Insofar as labour power (a commodity, after all) remains inextricably bound to actually living human beings, the persistence of mass under- and unemployment suggests that too much social labour time has been expended in the production of ‘socially unnecessary’ human beings. That the sale of labour power provides living individuals with their means of subsistence is in no way a concern for capital and the logic – the ‘regulative law’ – governing what counts as socially necessary. If their labour power remains unsold, such workers are summarily ‘rendered superfluous’ – that is, no longer ‘necessary for the self-valorization of capital’.47
We can now understand that individuals face liquidation not only anthropologically, i.e. that the ‘all-powerful identity-principle, the abstract commensurability of their social labour, drives them towards the obliteration [Auslöschung] of their personal identity’.48 Moreover, capital threatens to liquidate actually living individuals when it no longer needs their labour-power. Those who find themselves among the intractably unemployed ‘prove’ to be unnecessary for capital accumulation. Along with expropriation and exploitation, exclusion crowns the trifecta of ‘the monstrous objective power which social labor itself erected opposite itself as one of its moments’.49 In other words, capitalist production increases by impoverishing human beings via economic exclusion.
Marx explains this contradiction with the concept of the ‘changing organic composition of capital’, which holds that capital can boost the productivity of labour by increasing its share fixed in means of production (e.g. machinery) by diminishing the share laid out in the purchase of labour power. On the one hand, capitalist production tends to massively increase the productivity of social labour; that is to say, ‘constantly increasing the quantity of means of production may be set in motion by a progressively diminishing expenditure of human power’ by applying machinery and large-scale industry to production. On the other hand, this increasing productivity (made possible by the increase in the means of production relative to labour power) makes it increasingly more difficult for workers to find or expect steady employment, i.e. to readily find a buyer for their labour-power.50
The implications of the organic composition of capital for the class forced to sell their labour-power are twofold. First, an increasing proportion of the working-class tends to be relegated to the ‘industrial reserve army’ as capital requires an ever-decreasing expenditure of living human labour for its accumulation. Secondly, the absolute population of the working-class swells despite an increasing proportion of whom are confined to the reserve army. In the ceaseless thirst for surplus-value, capital drives down the proportion of necessary to surplus labour-time in the production process. This drive to reduce necessary labour-time explains the increase of the population amid the precariousness of waged-work because the reduction of overall necessary labour-time means that ‘the production of workers becomes cheaper, more workers can be produced in the same time, in proportion as necessary labor-time becomes smaller or the time required for the production of living labor capacity becomes relatively smaller’.51 In other words, the ‘decrease of relatively necessary labor appears as increase of the relatively superfluous laboring capacities – i.e. as the positing of surplus population’.52
Although it appears as ‘overpopulation’, this surplus population is ‘purely relative’ in that its numbers are not determined by the availability of the means of subsistence as such but by the social forms of producing and distributing these means. Likewise, there is no ‘absolute mass of means of substance’ because ‘the number and extent of his [the human-being] so-called necessary requirements, as also the manner in which they are satisfied, are themselves products of history’.53 Despite the persistence of Malthusian assumptions up to the present day, there exist no ‘natural’ laws of human population and hence no ‘overpopulation’. Rather, what appears as a ‘surplus population’ in capitalist society expresses a ‘surplus of labor capacities’ over and beyond those needed for capital.54 We will return to the implications of this conflation in the conclusion. First we need to consider some of the shortcomings posed by the concept of surplus population.
III. The ‘immiseration thesis’ & the relevance of surplus population
Although Adorno and Marx provide the theoretical basis for the present argument – that the liquidation of the individual applies not only to the superfluity of bourgeois individuality as anthropological type but also to actually living individuals – we cannot simply reproduce without modification their respective treatments of the concept ‘surplus population’. The term has been laden with the problems of the so-called ‘immiseration thesis’, which largely concerns the historical-empirical refutation of the prognosis of an ever-growing pauperization and inevitable collapse of capitalism. Alongside the development of capitalist production, Marx writes that ‘the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, and exploitation grows; but with this there also grows the revolt of the working class . . . capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a natural process, its own negation . . . the expropriators are expropriated’.55 ‘Against this argument’, Adorno writes in the 1940s, ‘all the statistics can be marshalled’ – ‘shorter working hours; better food, housing, and clothing; protection for family members and for the worker in his old age; [and] an average increase in life expectancy’.56 Although it is debatable as to what degree such concessions were won by the threat of revolt or by the administrative contraception of one, ineluctable pauperization seemed empirically refuted by the mid-twentieth century. For Adorno, ‘To speak of “relative immiseration” is ludicrous’.57 Likewise, while the proletariat existed ‘half-outside society’ in Marx’s time, their integration suggests that ‘Marx’s prognosis finds itself verified in an unsuspected way: the ruling class is so well fed by alien labour that it resolutely adopts as its own cause the idea that its fate is to feed the workers and “to secure for the slaves their existence within slavery” in order to consolidate their own’.58
While Adorno rightly emphasizes the process of proletarian integration as integral to the survival and transformation of twentieth century capitalism, his analyses are not immune to the limits of his own historical horizon. At times he suggests that the relations of production have superseded and neutralized the forces, the integration of the proletariat has irrevocably obliterated class consciousness, or, that the ‘natural economic catastrophes’ characteristic of the capitalism’s liberal age appear to have been overcome by Keynesian state intervention.59 With the advantage of writing some 50 years after Adorno’s death in 1969, we too can marshal ‘all the statistics’ against these remarks, which seem to assume the perpetuity of what Marcuse in the mid-1960s coined the ‘comfortable unfreedom’. Since the long downturn of the 1970s, it has become increasingly clear that the relative prosperity and high rates of employment in the rich countries of the post-war years were much more the exception to the rule of capitalist development.60
Much like those of Marx, the profundity of Adorno’s analyses become evident when he glimpses tendencies that express the laws of motion specific to modern capitalist society even when they do not so readily appear. An example of such insight returns us to our main line of inquiry. Despite the relative abundance within the developed countries of the 1960s, Adorno continues to adduce strong indications of capital’s tendency to render labour superfluous in the form of human beings. ‘[A] society which in its absurd present form has rendered not work, but people superfluous, predetermines, in a sense, a statistical percentage of people whom it must divest itself in order to continue to live in its bad, existing form’. Therefore, on the one hand, it appears that ‘by continuing to live one is taking away that possibility from someone else, to whom life has been denied’. On the other hand, ‘if one does live on, one has, in a sense been statistically lucky enough at the expense of those who have fallen victim to the mechanism of annihilation and, one must fear, will still fall victim to it’.61 Likewise, Adorno could write in 1964:
At bottom, I believe that domination . . . expresses itself despite prosperity; that all of us ultimately experience ourselves in this society in accordance with our labor as potentially superfluous. In a way, we only eke out an existence by the mercy of society . . . and that this deep feeling of superfluity ultimately underlies why our current condition can be generally described as one of malaise, precariousness, and the compulsion for security.62
Certainly, the ‘prosperity’ of the working-class in developed countries is no longer as it once was. Likewise, current forms of the superfluous labour seem to be calling into question the system’s capacity to ‘absorb the underlying population’.63 Nevertheless, Adorno’s analysis of the liquidation of the individual strongly anticipates what Honneth calls the ‘social pathology’ of individualization, which he describes as ‘a number of symptoms of inner emptiness, of feeling oneself to be superfluous, and of absence of purpose’.64 Yet, unlike Honneth, Adorno’s commitment to the critique of political economy as critical theory provides a way to theorize these transformations in light of the possibility of emancipation, to which we will now turn.
IV. Emancipation from temporal domination
From the outset, this chapter has argued that the liquidation of the individual applies not only to the superfluity of bourgeois individuality as anthropological type but also to actually-living individuals. In reviewing the liquidation of the anthropological type, we linked its central components – self-effacement through self-preservation and the compulsion to conform – to the exigencies of finding a function within the division of labour, which most often takes the form of adapting labour-power to capital. In establishing the relevance of labour-power for the anthropological individual, we extended the thesis of the liquidation of the individual to ‘actually-living’ individuals as redundant or surplus labour-power. Such redundancy can be theorized as a failure of the validation of value, i.e. that the time expended by social labour to sustain the life of labour-power proves to be ‘wasted’ time. This redundancy of labour – i.e. the ‘overproduction’ of labour-capacity – expresses itself as the ‘overproduction’ of human beings, as a population relatively superfluous for capital. In this concluding section, we draw on Marx and Adorno to theorize how emancipatory moments continue to dwell in capital’s otherwise dismal tendencies.
Despite capital's drive to reduce socially necessary labour-time, it cannot reduce labour-time expenditure as a whole. So long as the capitalist mode of production retains value 'as sole measure and source of wealth', living labour remains the lifeblood of capital despite its growing superfluity. Since the source of new value necessary for capital accumulation remains living labour, what is rendered superfluous for capital is not value-producing labour, but human beings who do not produce value. Living labour as labour power remains essential for the existence of capital but such labour power needs only to be ‘at its disposal’ [disponibel Arbeitskraft]65 but in a twofold sense: spendable or ‘available for use’ while simultaneously expendable, or ‘able to be dispensed with’. As Marx writes, ‘the most powerful instrument for reducing labor-time’ for the production of material wealth ‘becomes the most unfailing means for turning the whole lifetime of the worker and his family into labour-time at capital’s disposal for its own valorization’.66 Here, to be ‘at capital’s disposal’ means ‘over-work’ for one part of the working-class and ‘enforced idleness’ for the rest condemned as surplus populations.67
However, toil and exclusion do not follow from the technical capacity to reduce labour-time within mass production but from its social form in capitalist society. As capital enlists the ‘powers of science and of nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse’, the quantity and quality of material wealth becomes increasingly divorced from the living labour-time expended in its production.68 Marx suggests that if the specific social form of capitalist society was overcome, the technical basis of mass production could be retained to serve the individual instead of the opposite. Indeed, capital creates the material conditions of a post-capitalist society wherein the ‘surplus labor of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth’. Marx even countenances the emergence of a post-capitalist anthropological type wherein the individual would no longer be simply an appendage, but a living purpose – what Marx calls the ‘social individual’. The dynamic of capitalist production prepares the grounds for this transformation because capitalism ‘despite itself’ is ‘instrumental in creating the means of social disposable time, in order to reduce labor time for the whole society to a diminishing minimum, and thus to free everyone’s time for their own development’.69 According to Marx, the ‘free development of individualities’ requires that necessary labour time is reduced to the barest minimum. Hitherto such conditions have only been attainable by members of the ruling classes. In short, then, the abolition of class society requires that society be freed from a form of wealth based on the ‘theft of alien labor time’.70
This emancipatory horizon of a post-work society (i.e. one no longer ruled by ‘alien labor time’) is retained in Adorno’s theory insofar as it recognizes that radical reductions in labour-time would constitute a world-historical shift in social organization. The germ of ‘the possibility of change’, writes Adorno, is the development of productivity capacity ‘which will make human labor superfluous up to a point. The decrease in the quantity of work, which could theoretically be at a minimum even today, prepares the way for a new quality to come into society’. Indeed, ‘given radically reduced labor-time’, the horror of the precariousness and vulnerability that ‘forms the individual through and through’ could be overcome.71
To raise ‘the question of individuality anew’, as Adorno invites us to do, we considered the liquidation of the individual as a contribution to the critique of political economy. Unlike those of the second- and third-generation Frankfurt School, who emphasize a one-sided decline of the individual, the analysis given here uses the liquidation thesis to illuminate the contradictions of the individual in the process of its dissolution. Contradictions can reveal tendencies that point to immanently possible transformations conducive to emancipation. For instance, exchange as a ‘social a priori’ constitutes a real contradiction in that it possesses a ‘real objectivity and is nevertheless objectively untrue’ in that ‘it violates its own principle, that of equality’.72 By demonstrating that the exchange of commodities proceeds both equally and non-equally, Marx not only demystifies the source of surplus-value but also uncovers capital’s immanent drive to increase labour-productivity to such heights that the measure of material wealth by labour-time becomes effectively obsolete. However, as explored above, so long as the reign of production for production’s sake retains labour-time as the measure of value, the redundancy of labour-time expresses itself in the absurd form of the redundancy of human beings.
As with exchange, the fungibility and superfluity of the individual have ‘real objectivity’ that is nevertheless ‘objectively untrue’. The fungibility of the individual obtains this real objectivity insofar as the products of labour-power count as congealed units of abstract labour-time. As labour-power, the individual is indeed absolutely fungible vis-à-vis the production of value. Indeed, the ‘real objectivity’ evinced by the fungibility of the individual is nothing other than the spectral-like objectivity of value as it ‘haunts the space between the real and ideal’.73 As Adorno explains, compared to ‘bodily reality and all tangible data’, the ‘real conceptuality’ of value may appear as ‘illusion’ [Schein]. Yet, given the preponderance of value in the organization of production, ‘illusion dominates reality’ as ‘what is most real’.74 In spite of the reality of the fungibility that value confers on the individual, it is also untrue. It is not human beings who are in themselves fungible – mutually interchangeable as identical instances of each other – but their labour-power. While untrue, such fungibility is nevertheless real. The conflation of labour-power and the human being is objectively rooted in the capitalist form and organization of labour, since living labour-power cannot exist apart from living human beings. Capital has no need of considering the human being attached to labour-power as anything other than a carcass of time. Yet, this fungibility of the actually-living individual, all too real, remains objectively untrue. According to Adorno, if fungibility entails ‘the complete disposition [Verfügung] of all over all’, it would prove incompatible with domination as ‘the disposition of one over others’, whether that ‘one’ would be the ruling class or the heteronomy of society over its captive membership. Indeed, Adorno suggests: ‘Pure fungibility would destroy the core of domination and promise freedom’.75 Along the same lines, Marx’s critique of the concept of ‘surplus population’ reveals that it is not human beings who are superfluous but value-producing labour. As with exchange and fungibility, the very concept of superfluity retains an unredeemed promise in the untruth of its prevailing form. To be superfluous – not needed because there already exists more than enough – could only be achieved in a society of abundance, in which plentitude exists for the individual as a ‘living purpose’ instead of the opposite.
Notes
I would like to thank the editors of this volume and Jeta Mulaj for their generous critical feedback on drafts of this chapter.
1 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Individuum und Organisation’, in Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003), Vol. 8: 450 My trans.
2 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life,translated by Edmund Jephcott (New York: Verso, 2005), §97.
3 Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), Vol. 1: 106; Adorno, ‘Individuum und Organisation’, 451.
4 Ibid., 450.
5 For more nuanced accounts of transformation, see Dale Shin, ‘The Precarious Subject of Late Capitalism: Rereading Adorno on the “Liquidation” of Individuality’, in Individualism: The Cultural Logic of Modernity, edited by Zubin Meer (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), 203–18; Massimiliano Tomba, ‘Adorno’s Account of the Anthropological Crisis and the New Type of Human’, in (Mis)Readings of Marx in Continental Philosophy, edited by Jernej Habjan and Jessica Whyte (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 34–50.
6 Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 159ff; Tobias Ten Brink, ‘Economic Analysis in Critical Theory: The Impact of Friedrich Pollock’s State Capitalism Concept’, Constellations 22, no. 3 (2015): 336; Axel Honneth, The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory, translated by Kenneth Baynes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 72ff; Moishe Postone, ‘Critical Theory and the Historical Transformations of Capitalist Modernity’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Theory, edited by Michael J. Thompson, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose (New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2017), 137–63.
7 Honneth, The Critique of Power, 72–83.
8 Adorno, Minima Moralia, §88.
9 Ibid., p. 18.
10 Ibid., §83.
11 Chris O’Kane, ‘“Society Maintains Itself despite All the Catastrophes That May Eventuate”: Critical Theory, Negative Totality, and Crisis’, Constellations 25, no. 2 (2018): 287–301; Dirk Braunstein, Adornos Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2011); Werner Bonefeld, Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014).
12 Adorno, Minima Moralia, §147.
13 Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, translated by Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (London: Routledge, 2002), 27.
14 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Society [1965]’, Salmagundi 10–11 (1969): 151.
15 Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964–1965, translated by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2006), 6.
16 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, translated by Dennis Redmond 2001, 258–61, http://members.efn.org~dredmond/ndtrans.html.
17 Adorno, Minima Moralia, §147.
18 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On Popular Music’, Studies in Philosophy and Social Science IX (1941): 25ff; Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’, in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, edited by Andrew Arato and Eike Gephardt (New York: Continuum, 1982), 278ff.
19 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 21–2.
20 Ibid., 23.
21 Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1: A Critique of Political Economy, translated by Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 586.
22 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?’, in Can One Live After Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, translated by Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 117.
23 Adorno, Minima Moralia, §147. It is no surprise that Adorno calls this transformation the ‘changing organic composition of the human-being’, the model of which is taken from Marx’s analogous ‘changing organic composition of capital’. We will explore this concept in the next section.
24 Adorno, ‘Society [1965]’, 145.
25 Karl Marx, ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production [1863–66]’, in Capital Vol. 1: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 1019.
26 Adorno, Minima Moralia, §147.
27 Schweppenhäuser, Ethik nach Auschwitz, 167.
28 Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 18 as explained by Hermann Schweppenhäuser, ‘Das Individuum im Zeitalter seiner Liquidation: Über Adornos Soziale Individuationstheorie’, ARSP: Archiv Für Rechts- Und Sozialphilosophie / Archives for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, 57, no. 1 (1971), 93.
29 Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, translated by Samuel Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 115.
30 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 29.
31 Adorno, ‘Society [1965]’, 149; Adorno, History and Freedom, 211.
32 Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, 26.
33 For a discussion of the ‘fungibility of the individual’ as a crucial moment of identity, see Richard A. Lee, The Thought of Matter: Materialism, Conceptuality and the Transcendence of Immanence (London; New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 52ff.
34 On the individual’s historical character, see: Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991 and the entry on ‘individual’ in Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press,1985).
35 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 29.
36 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 149.
37 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, edited by Maurice Dobb, translated by S.W. Ryazanskaya (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 32 my emphasis.
38 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 6: 1845–48 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 127 Trans. amended.
39 Marx, Capital, 125–6.
40 Ibid., 131.
41 Ibid., 435–6, my emphasis.
42 Ibid., 168, cf. 129, 433ff.
43 Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 45.
44 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 202.
45 ‘The forms which stamp [stempln] products of labor into commodities . . . are therefore presupposed by the circulation of commodities’, Capital, I, 168 [trans amended].
46 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 202, my emphasis.
47 Ibid., 557.
48 Adorno, ‘Society [1965]’, 148 trans. corrected.
49 Karl Marx, Grundrisse, translated by Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin, 1973), 831.
50 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 798.
51 Marx, Grundrisse, 400; Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 433ff.
52 Marx, Grundrisse, 608–9.
53 Ibid., 608; Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 275.
54 Marx, Grundrisse, 608. We should note that being rendered superfluous for capital does not necessarily entail unemployment if the capitalist class can hire ‘unproductive’ servants, which itself has limits. For an extended discussion of productive and unproductive labour, see Marx, ‘Results’, 1038–49.
55 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 929.
56 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Reflections on Class Theory’, in Can One Live After Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader, edited by Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 103.
57 Adorno, ‘Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?’, 112.
58 Adorno, ‘Reflections on Class Theory’, 105.
59 Adorno, ‘Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?’, 112. For a discussion, see Stefano Petrucciani, ‘Adorno’s Criticism of Marx’s Social Theory’, in Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis (New York: Routledge, 2015), 19–32.
60 For nearly 40 years, OECD countries have been attended by a persistent decline in the rate of economic growth, and equally persistent increases in overall indebtedness as well as inequality in terms of income and wealth. Wolfgang Streeck, ‘How Will Capitalism End?’, New Left Review 87 (June 2014).
61 Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 113.
62 Adorno, Philosophische Elemente, 99. My trans.
63 For a recent literature review, see Nick Bernards and Susanne Soederberg, ‘Relative Surplus Populations and the Crises of Contemporary Capitalism: Reviving, Revisiting, Recasting’, Geoforum, 2020, 10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.12.009
64 Axel Honneth, ‘Organized Self-Realization: Some Paradoxes of Individualization’, European Journal of Social Theory 7, no. 4 (1 November 2004): 467.
65 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 798.
66 Ibid., 531–2. My emphasis.
67 Ibid., 789.
68 Marx, Grundrisse, 704–8.
69 Ibid., 158 and 708, my emphasis.
70 Ibid., 708.
71 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 272–5.
72 Ibid., 190.
73 Lee, The Thought of Matter: Materialism, 43.
74 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Sociology and Empirical Research’, in The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, translated by David Frisby and Glyn Adey (London: Heinemann, 1976), 80.
75 Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 105.