Frankfurt School: Late Capitalism or Industrial Society? by Theodor Adorno 1968

Frankfurt School: Late Capitalism or Industrial Society? by Theodor Adorno 1968. Social being does not immediately produce class consciousness. Without the masses, and indeed precisely because of their social integration, having any more control over their social destiny than 120 years ago, they lack not only class solidarity, but also the full consciousness of this, that they are objects and not subjects of social processes, which nevertheless animate them as subjects. Class- consciousness, on which according to Marxist theory the qualitative leap forwards depended, was consequently and at the same time an epiphenomenon. If however no class consciousness emerges over long periods in countries supposedly determined by class relations, for example North America, insofar as it had ever been present there; if the question of the proletariat becomes a puzzle-picture, then quantity rebounds into quality, and the suspicion of a conceptual mythology can only be suppressed by decree, not assuaged by thought. This development is difficult to separate from the central plank of Marxist theory, namely the doctrine of surplus value. This was supposed to explain the relationship of classes and the increase of class antagonisms as something objectively economic. But if the share of living labor, from which all surplus value accordingly flows, sinks, thanks to the extension of technological progress, to a tendential limit-point, then this affects the central plank, the theory of surplus value. The current lack of an objective theory of value is conditioned not merely by what the academy narrowly defines as scholastic economics. It also refers back to the prohibitive difficulty of objectively grounding the construction of classes without the theory of surplus value. Non-economists may find it illuminating, that even the so-called neo-Marxist theories attempt to stop the holes in their treatment of constitutive problems with scraps of subjective economics. The responsibility for this is certainly not merely the weakness of theoretical capability. It’s conceivable that contemporary society cannot be contained within a coherent theory.

I take three ideas from this passage from Adorno (1968):

1.  Social processes animate subjects. Class relations, then, may very well fail to produce anything like a class consciousness. In fact, one of the ways that communicative capitalism produces the subjects it needs is through the incitement and cultivation of individual identity.

2.  Communicative capitalism (as a version of post-industrial capitalism) does not depend on the extraction of surplus value. It depends on our ability to add it, contribute it. We contribute it a variety of ways--volunteering, supplying our attention and eyeballs, providing content, investing our feelings of superiority and hipness into items and thereby producing difference out of a field of sameness (jeans, shoes, status oriented consumer items etc).

3.  Contradictions and problems in theory are contradictions and problems in reality.

Comments

[Evan D.]

I might have missed this, but what are "subjective economics"?

[Bob Allen]

Social processes animate subjects-- but I reach an opposite conclusion: class relations, or rather their oppositional nature, are exposed through struggle such as industrial strikes. But one has to be in that situation, and maybe even have a grasp of theory, to put the pieces together to build class consciousness. Therefore deindustrialization is no accident.
Communicative capitalism as I read it is kind of a superstructure that sits atop the surplus value extracting basic capitalism-- it is like a screen, emanating a false consciousness.
Your point about the divisions along lines of identity is quite true

[Mehmet Çagatay]

Hello,

I just started reading your text (Communicative Capitalism: circulation and the foreclosure of politics), so far I have the impression that perhaps your concept implies a situation where the letter never "arrives" its destination (as in the case G. Bush did not "receive" the anti-war massage of the masses) since massages are produced for the sake of exchange in the first place. As long as massages are admitted in circulation, they are considered as received regardless of their addressee.

I have a question about your judgment that "intense circulation of content in communicative capitalism forecloses the antagonism necessary for politics". I assume "foreclosure" in your work is related to psychosis, if it is so, does not the particular characteristic of this flight of ideas (absence of Leftist quilting points) determine the foreclosure of politics, but not the intensity of circulation?

I’m only at page 4 of your text, thus forgive me if my question is due to my impatience or misunderstanding.

[Jodi]

I don't understand the question (or maybe the implication?). Anyway, foreclosure would not determine intensity; intensity would have its own dynamic (energetics). FYI--in the version of Comm Cap coming out in the book in September, I tone down the language of foreclosure at that point, concerned that it might be too strong. But, by the final chapter, I've returned to it explicitly, sketching the contours of the psychotic politics that result.

[Mehmet Çagatay]

Hello,

To be clear, while I was reading your text (a 34 page long word doc) two passages came to my mind from Lacan and Marx. In the first one where Lacan points out that punctuation plays a decisive role of hooking up, he argues that neurotics also speaks their inner discourse sometimes as frequently as psychotics but with the exception that they are not possessed by a scrambling device. (I related this passage with your emphasis on "intense circulation of content") the other passage is from Capital, where Marx, defines the exchange of commodities as a "modus vivendi" of capitalist production, a form in which its contradictions and inconsistencies exist side by side: "For instance, it is a contradiction to depict one body as constantly falling towards another, and as, at the same time, constantly flying away from it. The ellipse is a form of motion which, while allowing this contradiction to go on, at the same time reconciles it." With Lacan in my mind, I thought that maybe you are putting much emphasis on circulation than it deserves, but with Marx, I thought you might be right, circulation itself reconciles the contradictory content. Again, this was my first impressions of the first 4 pages. I’m still there as it was 6:00 am and I felt sleepy. Hopefully I will finish it tonight.