Adorno and Neoliberalism

The Critique of Exchange Society

Charles A. Prusik

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350103252
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

The first book to investigate the relevance of Theodor W. Adorno's work for theorizing the age of neoliberal capitalism. Through an engagement with Adorno's critical theory of society, Charles Prusik advances a novel approach to understanding the origins and development of neoliberalism. Offering a corrective to critics who define neoliberalism as an economic or political doctrine, Prusik argues that Adorno's dialectical theory of society can provide the basis for explaining the illusions and forms of domination that structure contemporary life. Prusik explains the importance of Marx's critique of commodity fetishism in shaping Adorno's work and focuses on the related concepts of exchange, ideology, and natural history as powerful tools for grasping the present. Through an engagement with the ideas of neoliberal economic theory, Adorno and Neoliberalism criticizes the naturalization of capitalist institutions, social relations, ideology, and cultural forms. Revealing its origins in the crises of the Fordist period, Prusik develops Adorno's analyses of class, exploitation, monopoly, and reification to situate neoliberal policies as belonging to the fundamental antagonisms of capitalist society.

1

Exchange Society

Neoliberalism is unfolding through a contradictory dynamic. This contradiction can be understood as an ongoing process of mediation, characterized by the integration of private individuals into networks of global capitalist markets. Neoliberalism establishes indirect networks of dependency between individuals through financial institutions and speculative capital flows. These networks of dependency are highly sensitive to the volatility of the world market. When an individual in the United States makes a payment on debt, for example, financial institutions speculate on the future value of the interest on an international scale. Financialization has established complex instruments for capital accumulation that has tied seemingly disconnected individuals to the interconnected rule of markets. The financial crisis of 2007–08 revealed the capacity for a systemic crash of the world economy. Despite this global, impersonal form of objective dependency, individuals in neoliberalism experience their membership in society through increasingly atomistic, self-interested modes of identity. As many commentators have indicated, neoliberalism induces individuals to manage every aspect of life according to an entrepreneurial metric of investment, self-discipline, and competition.¹ Today’s social relations are mediated and impersonal, and yet individuals experience their mediation through its absence—that is, as isolated individuals. How can critical theory grasp this apparently contradictory logic?

This chapter argues that a return to Adorno’s critical theory of society as a “negative totality” can be mobilized to develop a framework for grasping the impersonal, abstract, and contradictory forms of domination in the neoliberal present. Understood as a critical theory of society that develops Marx’s critique of political economy and the fetishism of the commodity, Adorno’s thought can explain the social constitution of individuals by objective economic imperatives.² Specifically, by developing Adorno’s critique of commodity fetishism, I argue that the impersonal, mediated, and abstract character of neoliberalism’s domination of the individual can be illuminated by conceptualizing society’s structuring relations. Moreover, Adorno’s Marxist critique of commodity fetishism, exchange, and socialization by the negative totality can provide the basis for an understanding of how subjects are dominated by economic abstractions, and why subjectivity itself functions as a necessary moment in the reproduction of today’s neoliberal world. Before I can substantiate this claim I must first situate Adorno’s work in relation to Marx’s critique of political economy in general, and to Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism in particular. I argue that neoliberalism’s contradictory logic can begin to be deciphered through a reconstitution of the following concepts: (1) commodity fetishism, (2) real abstraction, (3) society as a negative totality.

Adorno’s theory of late capitalism advances a dialectical theory of society as a process of ongoing interdependence between subjects that reproduce itself automatically through commodity exchange. Throughout his work, Adorno invariably refers to late capitalist society as “exchange society” (Tauschgesellschaft), “commodity society,” or the rule of the “exchange principle.”³ In late capitalism, the institutions of politics, culture, and the forces of industrial production are all mediated by exchange. For Adorno, exchange is “the key to society” because it is the process that makes society a “social entity” by binding together individuals into a network of commodity relations.⁴ Adorno thus understands the exchange relation as the “essence of socialization” in capitalism.⁵ “The domination of men over men,” Adorno insists, “is realized through the reduction of men to agents and bearers of commodity exchange.”⁶ Exchange, he claims, is not only an economic transaction between individuals but an “all-round mediator” that constitutes society as a universal system.⁷

Society, Adorno insists, is no longer intelligible: “Only the law of its becoming independent is intelligible.”⁸ This autonomous independence of the social whole is the law of exchange—the universal synthesis that regulates the life of individuals. As Bellofiore and Riva indicate, for Adorno “exchange is the synthetic principle that immanently determines the connection of every social fact,” as well as the principle of mediation “that guarantees the reproduction of society through a process of abstraction.”⁹ In addition to integrating individuals into objective, impersonal econ omic relations, exchange forms the thinking, behavior, and attitudes of individuals according to the imperatives of capital accumulation. Connecting his theory of exchange society to Marx’s theory of the “law of value,” Adorno suggests that it is through the process of exchange that “society maintains itself,” and “continues to reproduce itself despite all the catastrophes that may eventuate.”¹⁰ By expanding Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism to the forms of thinking that predominate within late capitalism, Adorno’s critical theory explains how and why individuals constitute the very social relations that dominate them.

Commodity Fetishism

Following Marx’s critique of political economy, Adorno’s theory of society recovers the human relations and practices that appear in the form of economic things. Adorno’s negative dialectics is not an economic theory of society; his critical theory does not purport to uncover the “truth” of society in the form of immutable, economic laws.¹¹ On the contrary, critical theory targets the “untruth” of society in its reduction to economic objectivities. As Werner Bonefeld suggests, “Negative dialectics is the dialectics of a social world in the form of an economic object, one that is governed by the movement of economic quantities.”¹² Thinking against the grain of economic concepts, Adorno’s dialectics returns concepts to their sociohistorical genesis. Rejecting the dogmatic scientism of traditional Marxism and its affirmation of economic laws, Adorno’s critical theory articulates economic nature as a socially constituted “second nature.”¹³ The concepts of political economy are thus entirely negative in his thought—negative dialectics is the negation of economic necessity as a socially constituted necessity. Society appears natural because of the inevitable character of capitalist relations, which reproduce themselves as an apparently autonomous power over individuals and their needs.

Adorno situates his own work in relation to Marx’s critique of political economy as follows: “Marxist critique consists in showing that every conceivable social and economic factor that appears to be a part of nature is in fact something that has evolved historically.”¹⁴ Adorno’s critical theory deciphers the social practices, institutions, and relations that appear unchangeable. His negative dialectics subverts the objectivity of late capitalist society and its imperatives by recovering the social relations that manifest in the form of abstract laws. Critical theory, according to Adorno, articulates the manner in which human practice reappears to subjects in the form of economic fate.

In Capital, Marx developed a critique of classical political economy through an analysis of the “commodity-form.” The universal principle of society, he argued, is “the law of value, which capitalism realizes over the heads of men.”¹⁵ Above all, the capitalist mode of production is a system of production for exchange. Marx’s critique presents the fundamental categories of political economy as inversions of social relations in order to grasp the historically specific character of capitalist wealth. Through a detailed analysis of the commodity-form, Marx identified what he called the “dual character of commodities” as a contradictory relation between the “use-value” and “exchange-value” of the commodity.¹⁶

By unfolding the analysis of the commodity-form as a contradictory unity of use-value and exchange-value, Marx’s critique delineates the definite social relations in capitalism that appear in the form of value. Use-value, which refers to the material, physical, or sensuous properties of the commodity, constitutes the “material content of wealth” of society. For Marx, the usefulness of “a thing makes it a use-value.”¹⁷ Use-value refers to the domain of social need and is realized in the use or consumption of commodities. In the capitalist mode of production, use-values are the material “bearers” of exchange-value.

Against use-value, Marx identifies exchange-value as the only form in which the value of commodities can be expressed in capitalism. By exchange-value, Marx is referring to the quantitative relation, or proportion, between commodities. Exchange-value is not an intrinsic property of the commodity, but a relation between commodities. In capitalist societies, every commodity is exchangeable with every other commodity. Marx’s presentation of the dual character of commodities identifies a fundamental distinction regarding the historically specific character of capitalist wealth. On the one hand, the use-value of commodities “differ above all in quality,” while on the other hand, as exchange-values, commodities can only “differ in quantity.”¹⁸ As exchange-values, commodities “do not contain an atom of use-value.”¹⁹ Exchange-value then, according to Marx, expresses a comparability between commodities that are heterogenous in their physical properties. Because diverse, heterogenous use-values are exchanged, every commodity, insofar as it is an exchange-value, “must be reducible to some third thing,” that is, to an equivalence that is commonly shared by all commodities. The comparability in question cannot be attributed to a “geometrical, physical, chemical, or natural property of the commodities.”²⁰ According to Marx, the “third thing” that commodities have in common is that they are all products of labor. Exchange-value then, he concludes, is the bearer of “human labor in the abstract.”²¹

Marx’s analysis of the dual character of commodities specifies the fundamental contradiction of capitalist society—namely, that the production of material wealth (need) is in no way identical to the production of capitalist wealth (value). For Marx, capitalism can be understood as a definite mode of production that is characterized by the division of labor and the rule of abstract wealth over material wealth—by exchange-value over use-value. Exchange-value represents the necessary mode of expression, or form of appearance, of value.

Marx’s Capital reveals that the contradictory form of value is grounded in the “dual character of labor” embodied in commodities. On the one hand, Marx refers to the labor process with reference t...