Adorno and Marx

Negative Dialectics and the Critique of Political Economy

Werner Bonefeld, Chris O'Kane, Werner Bonefeld, Chris O'Kane

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350193659
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

While Adorno has tended to be read as a critic of the administered world and the consumer industry rather than a Marxist, Adorno and Marx e stablishes Adorno's negative dialectics as fundamental for understanding Marx's critique of political economy. This conception of the critique of political economy as a critical theory marks both a radical departure from traditional Marxist scholarship and from traditional readings of Adorno's work and warns against identifying Adorno with Marx or Marx with Adorno. Rather, it highlights the intersection between Adorno's critical theory and Marx's critique of political economy that produces a critical theory of economic objectivity that moves beyond Marxian economics and Adornonian social theory. Adorno and Marx offers an ingenious account of critical social theory. Its subversion of the economic categories of political economy contributes to the cutting-edge of contemporary social theory and its critique of social practice.

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Adorno and Marx: Negative dialectics and the critique of political economy

Werner Bonefeld and Chris O’Kane

The title of the book summarizes a recent intellectual history of the development of the critique of political economy as a critical social theory which emerged in the context of the new left of the late 1960s and has been elaborated by successive generations of critical scholars in different institutional settings ever since. The influence of the Frankfurt School is of particular importance for its development. It is connected with the Adorno-inspired New Reading of Marx in the then West Germany.¹ In the UK, it surfaced as the ‘social form’ analysis within the framework of the Conference of Socialist Economists.² These new readings of the critique of political economy as a critical social theory developed further in the intersection between the early critical theory of the Frankfurt School – mainly Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse – the West-German New Reading of Marx and ‘social form’ analysis under the rubric of ‘Open Marxism’.³ In the United States, it is associated with the work of, amongst others, Moishe Postone, Patrick Murray and Tony Smith.⁴ Contemporary developments of the new readings into a critical theory of money and time, the social relations of nature, surplus citizens, history, economic crisis, state, gender, subjectivity and labour include the works by, for example, Beverley Best, Carl Casegaard, Dimitra Kotouza, Christian Lotz, Christos Memos, Frederick Harry Pitts, Charles Prusik and Marina Vishmidt.⁵

The conception of the critique of political economy as a critical social theory is founded, first and foremost, on the rejection of the traditional Marxist notion of the economic forces as primary and its conception of class struggle as the motor of historical progress. Instead, these new readings conceived of the economy as an inverted form of the capitalistically organized social relations, and of the economic categories as perverted social categories. The economic relations thus express the conceptuality of historically specific social relations. Their conceptuality is therefore socially constituted, that is, economic nature amounts to a social nature. It is the nature of historically specific social relations. This insight emerges from Marx’s critique of ‘The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret’ in Capital, Volume One. According to this critique, economic relationships are fundamentally spectral.⁶ They amount to an objective illusion.⁷ Capitalist society is governed by independent movements of economic things and yet, these things are socially constituted. In the words of Herbert Marcuse, society in the form of the economic object manifests itself ‘behind the backs of the individuals; yet it is their work’.⁸ Their independent movement is thus both real and illusionary. The social individuals are governed by ‘the products of their own hands’, and it is through their social practices that they endow the economic things with a consciousness and a will. ‘They do this without being aware of it.’⁹ The economic object thus expresses definite social relations. Even the simplest elements, ‘the commodity for example, is already an inversion and causes relations between people to appear as attributes of things and as relations of people to the social attributes of things’.¹⁰

Marx argues further that the fetishism of commodities emerges from ‘the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them’.¹¹ What is peculiar to capitalism cannot also have a transhistorical force. For the new readings of the critique of political economy as a critical social theory, therefore, the capitalist labour economy is not a socially specific manifestation of general, transcendental economic forces that exist through a succession of modes of production, as argued in the Marxism of the second and third Internationals, Leninism and social democracy, which continue to be argued to this day in Marxian economics, political economy and democratic socialism.¹² Marxian economics understands itself as a science of economic matter. Its critique of the capitalist labour economy is not a critique of labour economy as such. It is rather a critique of the irrationality and exploitative character of the capitalist labour economy, and it amounts to an argument for a rational socialist labour economy in which the state is the central organizational power of economic planning. That is, for Marxian economics the ‘labour theory of value is a macro-economic one’.¹³ Marxist economics reconciles the critique of political economy with those same economic categories which Marx’s critique of fetishism exposes as inverted social categories and thus as deceitful and verrückte (perverted) abstractions of the social relations. As pointed out by Simon Clarke, the Marxist argument about a succession of modes of production took its cue not from Marx but rather from Smith’s stages theory of history.¹⁴ Furthermore, Marx’s reproach in his critique of the Gotha Programme to the socialists of his time similarly rejects their endorsement of labour as the category of social wealth as an ill-founded idea that takes the social character of capitalist labour as the ontological foundation of wealth in every society.

The new readings of the critique of political economy as a critical social theory rejected traditional versions of historical materialism as legitimating the then state socialist regimes and the organizational form of the Party as the vehicle of socialist transformation.¹⁵ Instead, they developed the ‘materialist method’ as a critique of the existing social relations, one which, in the words of Adorno, ‘dissolves things understood as dogmatic’.¹⁶ Adorno characterized the dialectical materialist view of history as a ‘perverter of Marxian motives’.¹⁷ According to Marx, it is ‘much easier to discover by analysis the earthly core of the earthly kernel of the misty creations of religion than to do the opposite, i.e. to develop from the actual, given relations of life the forms in which these have been apotheosized. The latter method’ he continues, ‘is the only materialist one, and therefore the only scientific one’. The former method belongs to the abstract materialism of the natural sciences ‘that excludes history and its process’.¹⁸ There is only one reality and that is the reality of the definite socio-historical forms of life. For Adorno’s students, Adorno’s negative dialectics paved the way from the then prevailing ideas of Marxian economics and political economy as an argument about the rational organization of labour economy in socialism towards the critique of political economy as a critical social theory. Negative dialectics is about the forms of life in reified society. Perhaps Helmut Reichelt comes closest when delineating the importance of Adorno’s critical theory for the new readings of Marx. As he sees it, Adorno and Horkheimer ‘held on to the theory of inverted sociability’. Their critical theory of capitalism as a negative totality of economic inversion ‘was primarily concerned with the genetic explication of society and society was understood as the totality of these inverted forms’.¹⁹ In this reading, and with reference to Alfred Schmidt, the critique of political economy amounts to a ‘conceptualised practice’ of the social relations²⁰ in and through ‘the forms of life in which these have been apotheosized’.²¹ Critically understood, Marx’s point about the peculiar social character of labour as the foundation of the fetishism of commodities demystifies the centrality of labour as the ‘negative ontology’ of the capitalist social relations. Moishe Postone’s understanding of the critique of political economy as a critique of labour economy derives from this insight. The practical consequences of this shift from a political economy of labour organization to a critique of political economy are formidable. It cuts from underfoot the idea of state-socialism as an alternative to the capitalist labour economy.

Reichelt makes his point about Adorno’s pivotal influence in the development of the new readings in a publication about Jürgen Habermas’s attempted reconstruction of historical materialism, which for him amounted to a traditional social theory. The attribute traditional refers to a research objective that seeks to identify the logic of social structures in abstraction from their social relations. In the case of Habermas, the separation of social reality into system world, which is the domain of system theory, and life-world, which is the domain of social action theory, characterized the return to traditional conceptions of society in Frankfurt critical theory. In Marxian economics and political economy, this same theoretical dichotomy pertains between, on the one hand, market and state as separate structural entities, and the social forces, on the other. The perennial question whether the economy determines the state, as allegedly it exclusively does in neoliberalism, or whether the state determines the economy, as allegedly it did during the post-war period of the so-called mass democratic Keynesian welfare state,²² is considered to be a matter of the balance of the social forces that manifest themselves through the state. For Marxian political economy what matters are the social interests and the moral values and the ethical standards attached to them. Habermas reproaches Marx, Adorno and Horkheimer for their failure to underpin their critical theories with normative commitments towards the ideas of justice, freedom, equality and, most importantly, the idea of reason.²³ Their negative critique of political economy, he suggests, is deficient because it lacks the foundational moral categories on which to improve social institutions for the better. In the context of the crisis of 2008, this theorizing led to two overlapping analyses. First, the crisis was seen as a consequence of an avoidable structural dysfunctionality, which was the consequence of outsourcing, the privatization of social welfare commitments and the so-called financialization of the economy. The economic crisis led to a political crisis, which akin to Habermas’s arguments about a ‘legitimation crisis’ in the 1970s appeared in the form of a crisis of democratic institutions and democratic forms of representation. These crises were seen to have been caused by corrupt neoliberal socio-economic values that had captured the seat of government and used the power of the state to disembed the economy from society. Second, for the sake of the good society, one that makes good of the promise of reason, the democratic forces of social justice, equality and freedom have to recapture the seat of government in order to overcome the unfavourable neoliberal socio-economic reality through a democratic politics of social integration and policies of distributive justice, changing the financial economy into a social (market) economy.²⁴ The practical humanism of the proposed resolution to human misery is well meaning and welcome. What it amounts to is unclear. As an analysis of the logic that holds sway in the capitalist social relations, it is fruitless.

The argument that Marx and Adorno do not espouse moral categories to found their normative commitments towards a politics of redistributive justice and social equality, reason and freedom, is well founded. In fact, both rejected such undertakings. With reference to Adorno, ‘the leftist critics fail to notice’ that the normative ideas of justice, freedom and equality are ‘themselves . . . afflicted with the same injustice under which they are conceived and bound up with the world against which they are set’.²⁵ Just as Marx’s critique of the economic categories is about the decipherment of the social relations in the form of the economic object, Adorno’s social theory does not identify society in abstraction from the social relations. Both Marx and Adorno understand that the moral categories of society do not express transcendental and eternal norms but that they are rather historically specific and that they thus cannot be ‘perceived without reference to the historical elements implicit in [them]’.²⁶ The liberal values of freedom, equality and justice depict individuals released from feudal social structures, who are granted the autonomy to engage within a system of justice that treats poor and rich, dispossessed workers and ‘moneybags’ as equal partners of wealth and as equals before the law.²⁷ The freedom from servitude is the freedom of exchange between formally equal traders in labour power, the one buying labour power to profit from its consumption as a personification of money that yields more money, the other selling it to make a living as a personification of surplus labour time. Thinking means venturing beyond. Yet, nobody can extract themselves from the world in which they live. The arguments about transcendental economic forces and transcendental norms read the existing society back into history and forward into so...