Adorno, Theodor - Late Capitalism or Industrial Society.pdf - Adorno - MKTK

Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?

Theodor Adorno, 1968

(Opening Address to the 16 th German Sociological Congress)

It has become customary for the outgoing chair of the German Society for Sociology to

say a few words of their own. In this case, his own position and the meaning of the

problems being posed are not to be strictly separated: each is unavoidably conjoined to

the other. On the other hand he can hardly present definitive solutions, which is the whole

point of discussion by the Congress. This theme was originally suggested by Otto

Stammer. In the meeting of the Executive Committee charged with arranging the

conference, it was gradually transformed; the present title crystallized out through

“teamwork” [in English]. Those who are unfamiliar with the state of current debate in the

social sciences can be forgiven for suspecting that this is a question of mere

nomenclature; that experts have the idle luxury of pondering whether the contemporary

era is to be named late capitalism or industrial society. In truth, it is not a question of

mere termini but something absolutely fundamental. The presentations and discussions

will be assisting us to ascertain whether the capitalist system continues to rule, albeit in a

modified form, or whether industrial development has made the concept of capitalism

itself, the difference between capitalist and non-capitalist states, and indeed the critique

of capitalism, outmoded. In other words, as to whether the currently popular thesis in

sociology, that Marx is obsolete, is correct. According to this thesis, the world has been

so thoroughly determined by an unimaginably-extended technology [Technik: technics],

that the corresponding social relations which once defined capitalism, the transformation

of living labor into commodities and therein the contradiction of classes, is becoming

irrelevant, insofar as it has not become an archaic superstition. All this can be related to

the unmistakable convergence between the technically most advanced countries, the

United States and the Soviet Union. In terms of living-standards and consciousness, class

differences have become on the whole far less visible in the Western states in question

than in the decades during and after the industrial revolution. The prognoses of class-

theory such as immiseration and economic crisis have not been so drastically realized, as

one must understand them, if they are not to be completely robbed of their content; one

can speak of relative immiseration only in a comic sense. Even if Marx’s by no means

one-sided law of sinking profit-rate has not been borne out on a system-immanent level,

one must concede that capitalism has discovered resources within itself, which have

permitted the postponing of economic collapse ad Kalendas Graecus – resources which

include the immense increase of the technical potential of society and therein also the

consumer goods available to the members of the highly industrialized countries. At the

same time the relations of production have shown themselves to be, in view of such

technological developments, far more elastic than Marx had suspected.

The criterion of class relations, which empirical research is fond of referring to as

“social stratification” [in English], strata divided according to income, life-style,

education, are generalizations of the findings of specific individuals. To that extent they

may be called subjective. In contrast to this, the more traditional concept of class was

objective, meant to be independent of indices, which are garnered out of the immediate

life of subjects, however much, by the way, that these express social objectivities.

Marxist theory rests on the position of entrepreneurs and workers in the production-

process, and ultimately of their control over the means of production. In the predominant

contemporary strains of sociology this conclusion has for the most part been rejected as

dogmatic. The controversy needs to be sorted out theoretically, not simply through the

presentation of facts, which indeed for their part make numerous contributions to the

critique, but which in light of critical theory can also conceal the structure. Even the

opponents of dialectics have no wish to delay a theory, which serves to account for

sociology’s own interests. The controversy is essentially one concerning interpretation –

even if it were only the attempt to banish the demand for such in the purgatory of that

which is extra-scientific.

A dialectical theory of society concerns itself with structural laws, which

condition the facts, in which it manifests itself and from which it is modified. By

structural laws we mean tendencies, which more or less stringently follow the historical

constitution of the total system. The Marxist models for this were the law of value, the

law of accumulation, the law of economic crisis. Dialectical theory did not intend to turn

structures into ordered schematas, which could be applied to sociological findings as

completely, continually and non-contradictorily as possible; nor systemizations, but

rather the procedures and data of scientific cognition of the already-organized system of

society. Such a theory ought least of all to withhold facts from itself, to twist them around

according to a thema probandum. Otherwise it would in fact fall right back into

dogmatism and would repeat conceptually what the entrenched authorities of the Eastern

bloc have already perpetrated through the instrument of Diamat: freezing into place what,

according to its own concept, cannot be otherwise thought than as something which

moves. The fetishism of the facts corresponds to one of the objective laws. Dialectics,

which has had its fill of the painful experience of such hegemony, does not hegemonize

in turn, but criticizes this just as much as the appearance, that the individuated and the

concrete already determine the course of the world hic et nunc [Latin: here and now]. It’s

very likely that under the spell of the latter the individuated and the concrete do not even

exist yet. Through the word pluralism, utopia is suppressed, as if it were already here; it

serves as consolation. That is why however dialectical theory, which critically reflects on

itself, may not for its part install itself domestic-style in the medium of the generality. Its

intention is precisely to break out of this medium. It too is not immune before the false

division of reflective thinking and empirical research. Some time ago a Russian

intellectual of considerable influence told me that sociology is a new science in the Soviet

Union. He meant of course the empirical kind; that this might have something to do with

what in his country is a doctrine of society raised to a state religion was no more apparent

to him, than the fact that Marx conducted empirical inquests. Reified consciousness does

not end where the concept of reification has a place of honor. The inflated bluster over

concepts such as “imperialism” or “monopoly”, without taking into consideration what

these words factually entail [Sachverhalten], and to what extent they are relevant, is as

wrong, that is to say irrational, as a mode of conduct which, thanks to its blindly

nominalistic conception of the matter at hand [Sachverhalten], refuses to consider that

concepts such as exchange-society might have their objectivity, revealing a compulsion

of the generality behind the matter at hand [Sachverhalten], which is by no means always

adequately translated into the operational field of the facts of the matter [Sachverhalte].

Both are to be opposed; to this extent the theme of the Congress, late capitalism or

industrial society, testifies to the methodological intent of self-critique out of freedom.

A simple answer to the question which lies in that thematic, is neither to be

expected nor really to be sought after. Alternatives which compel one to opt for one or

the other determination, even if only theoretically, are already mandatory situations,

modeled after an unfree society and transposed onto the Mind [Geist], towards which the

latter ought to do what it can to break unfreedom through its tenacious reflection. As

completely as the dialectician may refuse to draw a defining line between late capitalism

and industrial society, the less can he indulge in the pleasure of a non-committal on-the-

one-hand-but-on-the-other-hand. He must guard against simplification, contrary to

Brecht’s suggestion, precisely because the well-worn commonplace suggests the well-

worn response, just as the opposite answer falls so easily from the lips from his

opponents.

Whoever does not wish to be hoodwinked by the experience of the preponderance

of the structure over the matter at hand [Sachverhalten], will not, unlike most of his

opponents, devalue contradictions in advance to methodology, to mere conceptual errors

and attempt to stamp them out through the harmony of scientific systematics. Instead he

will trace them back into the structure, which was antagonistic ever since organized

society first emerged, and which remains so, just as the extra-political conflicts and the

permanent possibility of a catastrophic war, most recently also the Russian invasion of

Czechoslovakia, crassly demonstrate. This glosses over an alternative thinking, to that

unbroken formal-logical non-contradictoriness which projects itself onto that which is to

be thought. It is not a question of choosing between either form, according to one’s

scientific viewpoint or taste, but rather their relationship expresses for its part the

contradiction which characterizes the current era, and it befits sociology to articulate this

theoretically.

Many prognoses of dialectical theory have a contradictory relationship to one

another. Some simply did not fulfill themselves; certain theoretical-analytical categories

have lead meanwhile to aporias, which can only be thought out of the world with the

utmost artifice. Other predictions, originally closely associated with the former, have

been resoundingly confirmed. Even those who do not reduce the meaning of a theory to

its prognoses, would not hesitate to ascribe the claim of the dialectical one as partly true

and partly false. These divergences require for their part theoretical explanation. That one

cannot speak of a proletarian class-consciousness in the leading industrial countries does

not necessarily refute, in contrast to the communis opinio [prevailing opinion], the

existence of classes: class was determined by the position to the means of production, not

by the consciousness of its members. There are no lack of plausible reasons for the lack

of class-consciousness: that workers are no longer being immiserated, that they were

increasing integrated into bourgeois society and its world-views, as compared to the

period during and immediately after the industrial revolution, when the industrial

proletariat was being recruited from paupers and stood half-extraterritorial to society,

could not have been foreseen. 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 theoriest

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. By comparison, Marx had it much easier, when he laid out the

fully-fledged system of liberalism as a science. He only needed to ask whether capitalism

corresponded in its own dynamic categories to this model, in order to produce, out of the

determinate negation of the preexisting theoretical system, a system-like theory in its own

right. Meanwhile the market economy has become so honeycombed, that it mocks any

such confrontation. The irrationality of the contemporary social structure hinders its

rational development in theory. The perspective that the direction of economic processes

is passing into the hands of political power, though it follows from the logical dynamic of

the system, is at the same time also one of objective irrationality. This, and not simply the

sterile dogmatism of its followers, should help to explain why for a long time no really

convincing objective theory of society emerged. Under this aspect the renunciation of

such would be no critical advance of the scientific spirit, but an expression of compulsory

resignation. The regression of society runs parallel to that of its thinking.

In the meantime we are faced with no less drastic facts, which for their part can be

interpreted without [Adorno’s emphasis] the usage of the key concepts of capitalism only

with the utmost violence and caprice. The economic process continues to perpetuate

domination over human beings. The objects of such are no longer merely the masses, but

also the administrators and their hangers-on. In the terms of the traditional theory, they

have become largely functions of their own production-apparatus. The much-belabored

question of the “managerial revolution” [in English], concerning the supposed transition

of domination from the juridical owners to the bureaucracy is correspondingly secondary.

Then as now, this process produces and reproduces classes which, though not necessarily

in the form of Zola’s Germinal, at the very least a structure which the anti-socialist

Nietzsche anticipated with the expression, all herd and no shepherd. In this, however, was

concealed what he did not want to see: the same old social oppression, only now become

anonymous. If the theory of immiseration was not borne out a la lettre [French: to the

letter], then it certainly has in the no less frightening sense, that unfreedom, one’s

dependence on the consciousness of those who serve an uncontrollable apparatus, is

spreading universally over humanity. The much-maligned immaturity of the masses is

only the reflex of this, this they are as little as ever autonomous masters of their lives; like

in mythology, it confronts them as a doom [Schicksal: fate, destiny]. Empirical

investigations show by the way that even subjectively, according to their reality-principle

[Realitaetsbewusstsein], classes are by no means so leveled out as one at times presumes.

Even the theories of imperialism do not become obsolete due to the forcible withdrawal

of the great powers from their colonies. The process which they referred to continues in

the antagonism of both monstrous power-blocs. The supposedly outmoded doctrine of

social antagonisms, including the telos of the final crisis, is being immeasurably trumped

by manifestly political ones. Whether and to what extent class relations have been

relocated onto those between the leading industrial nations and the much courted-after

developing countries, remains to be seen.

In the categories of critical-dialectical theory I would like to suggest as a first and

necessarily abstract answer, that contemporary society is above all an industrial society

according to the level of its productive forces [Adorno’s emphasis]. Industrial labor has

become the model pattern of society everywhere and across all borders of political

systems. It developed itself into a totality due to the fact that modes of procedure, which

resemble the industrial ones, are extending by economic necessity into the realms of

material production, into administration, the distribution-sphere and that which we call

culture. Conversely, society is capitalism in terms of its relations of production

[Adorno’s emphasis]. Human beings are still what they were according to the Marxist

analysis of the middle of the 19 th century: appendages of machines, not merely in the

literal sense as workers, who have to adapt themselves to the constitution of the machines

which they serve, but far beyond this and metaphorically, compelled to assume the roles

of the social mechanism and to model themselves on such, without reservation, on the

level of their most intimate impulses. Production goes on today just as it did before, for

the sake of profits. Needs have gone beyond anything Marx could have foreseen in his

time, completely becoming the function of the production-apparatus, which they

potentially were all along, instead of the reverse. They are totally governed [gesteuert:

mechanically steered, governed]. To be sure, even within this transformation, as pinned-

down and adapted to the interests of the apparatus as it is, the needs of human beings are

smuggled in, something which the apparatus never fails to direct popular attention to. But

the use-value side of commodities has in the meantime been shorn of their last “naturally-

grown” or self-apparent truth [Selbstverstaendlichkeit: casualness, self-evidence]. Not

only are needs satisfied purely indirectly, by means of exchange-values, but within the

relevant economic sectors produced by the profit-motive, and thus at the cost of the

objective needs of the consumers, namely those for adequate housing, and completely so

in terms of the education and information over the processes which most affect them. In

the realm of necessities not directly connected with basic living standards, use-values as

such are tending to dissolve or be exhausted; a phenomenon which appears in empirical

sociology under termini such as status symbols and prestige, without really being

objectively grasped by such. The highly industrialized countries of the Earth, so long as,

in spite of Keynes, some renewed economic natural catastrophe does not occur, have

learned to conceal the more visible forms of poverty, albeit not to the extent that the

thesis of the “affluent society” [in English] would have it. The bane, however, which the

Adorno, Theodor - Late Capitalism or Industrial Society.pdf

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