Adorno and Marx: Negative Dialectics and the Critique of Political Economy by Werner Bonefeld & Chris O’kane

Author:Werner Bonefeld & Chris O’kane [Bonefeld, Werner & O’kane, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, Political, Movements, Critical Theory, Political Science, Political Ideologies, Communism; Post-Communism & Socialism
ISBN: 9781350193659
Google: FwZqEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2022-06-02T21:54:21+00:00

8

Society as real abstraction: Adorno’s critique of economic nature

Charles Andrew Prusik

In a time punctuated by crisis, the alternatives to capitalism appear as remote as ever. Why does the movement of speculative financial flows, of money, and of market prices appear to govern us like laws of nature? Although Theodor W. Adorno did not live to see the neoliberal revolution of the 1970s–1980s, his critical theory can provide a framework for theorizing the naturalization of the contemporary neoliberal turn of capitalist society.1 This chapter develops Adorno’s concepts of exchange and real abstraction to criticize economic concepts and categories, focusing on Marx’s dialectical approach to ‘natural history’ as the key to an immanent critique of economic theory. Adorno’s revitalization of Marx’s concepts of natural history, as well as the related concepts of commodity fetishism and real abstraction, can be developed to demystify the ideological function of the epistemological turn in neoliberal economic theory. The liberal concept of a free market society that arises through the spontaneous, competitive actions of individuals has returned in neoliberal theory, particularly in the work of Friedrich von Hayek, whose theory holds that the free market is a ‘superior information processor’, and the absolute horizon of all rational economic action.2 This chapter returns to Adorno to critique neoliberal society in its ideological appearance as a self-regulating, evolving order that asserts itself as an independent economic logic. I argue that Adorno’s dialectics reveals how the abstract and impersonal relations of capitalism are generative of reified forms of thought in social science, and how these forms of thought become ideological moments in the social world they reinforce. By conceptualizing society as a process of ‘subject-object’ mediation, Adorno’s dialectics can recover the genesis of economic concepts in their constitution by the practice of commodity exchange. Through a reconsideration of Adorno’s critique of positivism, social science, and subjective economics, I argue that the neoliberal free market can be grasped as an ideological form of thought that belongs to the structuring relations of capitalist society. In what follows I delineate Adorno’s critical theory of society by focusing on the related concepts of exchange, society as second nature, and real abstraction as the key to grounding the ideological function of economic thought in the neoliberal present.

Real abstraction and identity thinking

Adorno’s critical theory argues that value in capitalism is a socially constituted abstraction. Social reality is abstract because individuals relate to each other through commodity exchange. This understanding of society is grounded in Marx’s critique of the ‘fetish-character of the commodity’, a theory which suggests that capitalism is organized by isolated producers who only realize the social character of their labour through exchange.3 Adorno similarly maintains that the fundamental principle of capitalist society is the exchange abstraction, the principle of mediation that unconsciously synthesizes society as an objective whole. ‘What really makes society a social entity, what constitutes it both conceptually and in reality, is the relationship of exchange, which binds together virtually all the people participating in this kind of society.’ 4 Exchange is the ‘all-around mediator’ that connects individuals through abstract commodity relations.

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