ADORNO AND THE DISCUSSION OF THE PROLETARIAT AS A

REVOLUTIONARY SUBJECT
One of the hallmarks of Theodor W. Adornos negative anthropology, as elucidated by Werner Bonefeld, is the
powerful theoretical claim that first nature, the quest for a human essence, let alone its restoration, is both a
theoretical and practical dead-end. There is only second nature, the product of Mans [the species, not the
gender] historicity, her social existence. To question the vision of the human being as possessing a transhistorical essence is not to say that Man does not have distinct features and characteristics that persist over time;
a human nature if you will. Marxs own distinction between the bee and the human as architects in his
Capital, points to the capacity of Man for self-creation, and her historicity, that contrasts both with the slow
evolutionary processes to which Darwin had pointed and to Kants transcendental constitution of human
subjectivity, and the possibility of knowledge that it provides. Our own anthropological inquiry though has to
begin, then, with the historical presence of Man as shaped by the value-form and capitalist social relations, on
the one hand, and the objective-real possibility of abolishing them through revolution and communism, the
creation of a human community [Gemeinwesen], what Marcuse termed communist individualism, on the other.
What Adorno termed the rising organic composition of man, the mechanization of man, through what Marx
designated as the real domination of capital, [t]hat which determines subjects as means of production and not as
living purposes, increases with the proportion of machines to variable capital[1] and has become a horrific lived
reality for those who have only their labor-power to sell (even as an ever-greater segment of that class can find
no buyers for its commodity).
Economic categories, e.g. exchange, the commodity form, the money form, value, abstract labor, have their real
bases in definite social relations between men, specifically in the peculiar social character of the labor that
produces them.[2] Indeed, for Bonefeld, the economic categories that were unfolded by Marx in his critique of
political economy arise from the very class antagonism that has generated them.[3] The value-form, then, that
perverted [verrcte] social and historical form, expresses a social relation that appears as a relation between
things. It is a social relation that is opaque to those human beings whose own social action produces those very
forms. As Marx says, Man under capitalism is governed by the products of his own hand. The products in this
case being not just the commodities she produces, but those perverted social relations themselves that are
produced and reproduced by the social activity of the proletariat.
What Kant saw as the constitution of human subjectivity and the fundamental bases of all knowledge in his
Critique of Pure Reason, is, for Adorno, the historically constituted basis for knowledge in bourgeois-capitalist
society, transposed in Kants mind into the real world and its very ontological structure. Adorno, then,
penetrated beneath the reified social forms which Kant had ontologized and made metaphysical. What Kant, as
the philosopher of bourgeois-capitalist society had revealed as Adorno reads him, and as Christian Lotz reads
Adorno is how: [t]he subject that works itself off [abarbeiten] in relation to its object, produces itself and its
objects as abstract objects, as these objects disconnect themselves from their living dialectical constitution and
turn into fixed and reified structures.[4] As Lotz reads Adorno, then, on the one hand, the social and historical
world is made by the social activity of human subjects, and at the same time the world that we create
increasingly dominates us, since with every activity the independent object-character of the world increases.
Every domination of the object, according to Adorno, leads, hence, to a domination of the subject.[5] Here then
is the reification, the thing-like social forms to which Lukcs first pointed, but which now can be more directly
linked to the value-form itself, and the categories that Marx so patiently unfolded in his manuscripts for the
critique of political economy, still unknown when Lukcs wrote History and Class Consciousness.
Adornos own focus on reification clearly derives from Lukcs path breaking essay Reification and the
Consciousness of the Proletariat in History and Class Consciousness, though Adorno by the late 1950s had the
benefit of having had access to Marxs own previously unpublished texts for his critique of political economy,
including the Grundrisse, which were unknown to Lukcs in the early 1920s.[6] While Adornos starting point
is not unlike Lukcss and his claim that the commodity form and its fetish character, its reified phantom
objectivity, is the central structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects ., Adorno rejected
Lukcs claim that being the identical subject-object of the history of society[7] permitted the proletariat to
have a class consciousness that could grasp the reified, thing-like nature of capitalist social relations and overturn them. It is that very Hegelian inflected vision of the proletariat as the identical subject-object of history, and
its connection to Lukcs theory of imputed class consciousness linked to the Party, through which the
empirical consciousness of the proletariat can be aligned with its imputed class consciousness, that raises the
question of a certain determinism in Lukcs, one tantamount to a theology of class, in Norbert Trenkles
provocative phrase. It would seem that Lukcs vision here is one in which the proletariat virtually assumes the
role of an ontological category, and in which it has an irreducible aspiration towards totality.[8] For Lukcs,
then, the proletariat has an historical mission. Indeed, Lukcs Hegelianism in History and Class
Consciousness is indebted to Hegels own philosophy of universal history.

Adorno, by contrast, claims in his essay Subject and Object that the human being is a result, not an eidos;[9]
that she does not possess a trans-historical essence. Where Lukcs saw the human as a species-being
[Gattungswesen], with history as the stage upon which that pre-existing species-being or essence, once lost,
will finally be again actualized, Adorno saw humankind as the outcome of those mediations, those social
relations, produced and reproduced by its own social action, with the possibility that the existing mediations can
be overturned and new social relations created. Hegel plays a decisive role for both Lukcs and Adorno,
However, Lukcs Hegelianism in History and Class Consciousness is indebted to Hegels philosophy of
universal history; a vision that is teleological, while Adornos debt to Hegel (and the theoretical debt of those he
has most influenced, Krahl, Backhaus, Reichelt, as well as Moishe Postone and Werner Bonefeld) lies more with
Hegels philosophy of right and his logic, with its grasp of the role of abstraction as the veritable key to the
substantiality of value, and the multiple forms it assumes in the exchange relation. And that abstraction is what
Alfred Sohn-Rethel, whose influence on Adorno was considerable, describes as a real abstraction, not a
thought or mental abstraction: the abstraction does not spring from the human mind, but arises in the spatiotemporal sphere of human interrelations.[10]
It is here too, that Ernst Blochs category of objectively-real possibility can assume its rightful place in
Marxist theory; a category that is also rooted in actual historical being itself. Bloch sought to navigate the
difficult theoretical terrain through which Marxian theory must articulate the complex relationship between
determinism and possibility; necessity and contingency. For Bloch, causes are material presuppositions of
lawlike, necessary realization; by contrast, conditions are the material presuppositions of a possible realization
which will not come to pass without the help of an intervening subject. Thus, capitalism develops in itself the
conditions, not the causes, for a revolutionary breakthrough into Socialism in such a way that in its coming to an
end, it makes the breakthrough possible, but it does not contain the break as a law-like, necessary
consequence.[11] This crucial distinction between necessity and possibility, unfortunately obscured by
traditional Marxism, then, compels us to revisit the question of the revolutionary subject, whose socio-political
praxis is the key to making a revolutionary breakthrough from capitalism possible.
Within whats termed the new reading of Marx, based on all of his manuscripts for the critique of political
economy, now finally published, one of the issues raised has been the question of the subject: within capitalist
social relations based on the value-form, who or what is the subject? Marx himself speaks of capital as an
automatic subject or the dominant or active subject [bergreifende Subjekt][12]. The new reading has
explored the implications of Marxs term, together with its connection to Marxs own reading of Hegels
systematic dialectic, as well as how that important connection has been lost in both translations and discussions
of Marx.[13] What are the implications of designating capital or value as an automatic subject? What, then,
becomes of the proletariat as a revolutionary subject? This is not an issue of philological or even philosophical
let alone academic interest. For Bonefeld, there is a danger within the new reading of Marx of seeing
value as the self-moving essence of capitalist wealth, whereas his emphasis is on the definite social
relations of production, the class relations that actually produce the mysterious economic things that
seemingly possess the mystic character to instantiate themselves.[14] As Bonefeld reads Marx here, it is
insufficient to interpret Marx as saying that capital is something which relates to itself, that is, a thing which
has the capacity to self-valorisation.[15] Rather, [t]he idea of capital as something which is selfconstituting only reinforces the fetishism of a capitalist world which sees labour [the proletariat] only as a
wage-earning commodity.[16] What Bonefeld, then, has added is the crucial point that the constitutive power
of social labour exists and persists in a mode of being denied.[17] What appears to be the outcome of the
productive powers of capital is instead the perverted form of the powers of the proletariat and its social practice.
Bonefelds account of the social action of the worker in the sale of his/her labor power to the capitalist
(individual, corporation or state) is illuminating here: The rationally acting subjects who exchange on the
market to secure their being execute abstract social laws which they themselves have generated historically and
reproduce through their rational behaviour, and over which they have no control their rational practice exists
through them and in them, and also against them.[18]
For Bonefeld, correctly as I see it, class is not an affirmative concept, but an entirely negative concept. The
critique of class society finds its positive resolution not in better-paid and fully employed producers of surplusvalue. It finds its positive resolution only in the classless society.[19] Just as the proletariat does not restore a
lost species being or first nature, it does not create a republic of labor, or a society based on workers power, as
in the vision found in traditional Marxism, and even in the historical communist left. Emancipatory praxis, in my
view, proceeds through the abolition of labor, which is the only way to overturn social relations based on the
value-form. That entails a vision of a metabolism with nature based on modes of poesis distinct from labor as it
has historically manifested itself.
We are then confronted both theoretically and practically with the question of just how the proletariat can break
through those perverted social forms, that commodity fetishism, within which it is enmeshed, those reified social
relations that are not simply modes of false consciousness, ruling class ideologies, imposed upon it by its class
enemy, but rather social relations that appear to it to be the result of objective, a-historical, natural economic
laws and not the product of the proletariats own social activity. This latter condition, the veritable basis of

commodity fetishism, and bulwark of capitalist social relations, must be theoretically exposed if it is to be
politically attacked by revolutionaries and by the class itself. And here Adornos contribution, particularly his
vision of praxis, seems to me to require our close attention.
We are now at the intersection of Adorno as a Marxist theoretician and the incessant calls for him to commit to a
revolutionary practice that dominated the final years of his life; the tumultuous 1960s. Many of Adornos own
students, active in the German SDS (H-J Krahl, and Frank Bckelmann, among them) castigated their teacher for
his failure to embrace what for them was the revolution. Krahl, for example, saw Adorno as falling into a
regressive anxiety towards any form of active resistance against[20] the stabilization of monopoly capitalism;
indeed, as a thinker for whom the materialist dialectic of the chained forces of production are reflected in the
concept of a theory in its own chains, inescapably enmeshed in the immanence of its concepts;[21] a veritable
retreat into academicism. Krahls harsh judgment of 1969 looks very different today in the light of the actual
development of the revolutions which the SDS saw as the start of a global proletarian revolution: Maos
Cultural Revolution in China, the struggle of the NLF in Vietnam led by Ho, and the other anti-imperialist
upheavals in the Third World. The contemporary landscape of a China as a capitalist powerhouse, and a Vietnam
as a faithful ally of the U.S. in South-East Asia, all with the very same ruling class that inaugurated the Cultural
Revolution or that forced the Americans to abandon Saigon, casts a very different light on the enthusiasm of the
SDS in the 1960s.
By contrast, Adorno himself saw the voluntarism and adventurism of the SDS as a pseudo-revolution [Scheinrevolution] History has already provided a verdict on the apocalypticism of the leftism of that era, and its
political embrace of Stalinism and third-world nationalism, but perhaps in light of the very development of
capital and its power over the past 45 years, it is time to take another look at Adornos late writings and lecture
courses, especially his Marginalia to Theory and Practice (first published in 1969), as part of an inquiry into
the prospects for the emergence of the proletariat as a revolutionary subject at the present time.
Adorno forges no direct link between Marxist theory and the proletariat as revolutionary subject, but he provides
elements for such a link; elements that seem to me to be crucial. Lets start, then, with Adornos distinction
between actionism and praxis. For him, actionism is false or pseudo praxis; indeed it is regressive.[22] For
Adorno, actionism is truly conformist[23] just because it cuts itself off from theory. While actionisms
pseudo-activity claims to challenge the power of capital, lacking an adequate theory it ends up consolidating
that very power, and the social relations that produce it. Communization cannot emerge from the long road
through the institutions, as generations of leftists have claimed; nor can it simply emerge out of the desperation
that capitalism produces in abundance. As Adorno said: Praxis without theory cannot but fail . False
praxis is no praxis. Desperation that leaps blindly into praxis, with the purest of intentions joins forces with
catastrophe. .. The requirement that theory should kowtow to praxis condemns praxis to delusion.[24]
Theory, then, is the vital element if revolutionary praxis is to develop. The impatience with theory that emerges
whenever social struggles erupt is the surest way to see those eruptions end with a consolidation of the power of
capital.
Adornos theory, though, fails to provide any direct link to the proletariat as the revolutionary subject. Indeed as
witness to the defeat of proletarian revolution in the 1920s, the triumph of Stalinist counter-revolution and then
of fascism, and finally the spectacle of student revolutionaries with Maos Red Book in hand, and praise for
Ho Chi Minh and Castro on their lips, Adornos inability to see the proletariat as a revolutionary subject should
not surprise us. Indeed Adornos fears about the rising organic composition of man first articulated in the 1940s,
further developed in his texts on the power of the culture industry, culminated in his 1965 essay on Society,
seemingly leaving little room for revolutionary hope: Men must act in order to change the petrified conditions
of existence, but the latter have left their mark so deeply on people, have deprived them of so much of their life
and individuation, that they scarcely seem capable of the spontaneity necessary to do so.[25] Nonetheless, for
Adorno, the fact that the possibility of responding to that danger is threatened with suffocation could be the
first condition for an ultimate break with societys omnipotence.[26] Adornos pessimism, then, was never total
Moreover, today, as a new generation of revolutionaries has now sought to unite Marxist theory with the
prospect of revolutionary praxis, with communization, Adornos seminal insight that the proletariat literally
produces and continuously reproduces its own chains, the social relations that imprison it, points directly to
the only class that can smash those chains and create a human community. The burden of theory today is to
assume the task with which history has now confronted it.

Mac Intosh

[1] Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (NLB, 1974), p.229.

[2] Marx, Capital, volume I (Penguin Books, 1976), p.165.
[3] Werner Bonefeld, Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy (Bloomsbury, 2014), p.9.
[4] Christian Lotz, Capitalist Schematization: Political Economy, Exchange, and Objecthood in Adorno in
Zeitschrift fr kritische Theorie, Heft 36-37/2013., p.116.
[5] Christian Lotz, The Capitalist Schema: Time, Money, and the Culture of Abstraction (Lexington Books,
2014), p.19.
[6] Not only were Adornos students, including H-J Krahl, H-G Backhaus, H. Reichelt, avid readers of what
were then Marxs recently published texts, but so too was Adorno, as the research of Dirk Braunstein, Adornos
Kritik der politischen konomie, shows. That would not be apparent to those whose reading of Adorno was
focused on Dialectic of the Enlightenment.
[7] Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness, (The MIT Press, 1971), p.206.
[8] Ibid., p.198.
[9] Theodor W. Adorno, Subject and Object, in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (eds.), The Essential
Frankfurt School Reader (Urizen Books, 1978), p.511. Moreover, as Adorno says, not only is the subjects
formation an historical phenomenon, but claims for the subjects a-historical nature is a wishful
projection at times, but today no more than a lie. Ibid., p.499.
[10] Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology (Humanities Press, 1983),
p.20.
[11] Ernst Bloch, Causality and Finality as Active, Objectifying Categories (Categories of Transmission) in
Telos, number 21, Fall 1974, p.104. This is from a chapter of Blochs at that time still unpublished
Experimentum Mundi.
[12] Marx, Capital, volume I, pp. 255-56.
[13] See, for example, Riccardo Bellofiore, Lost in Translation? Once Again on the Marx-Hegel Connection in
Marxs Capital and Hegels Logic: A Reexamination, Edited by Fred Moseley and Tony Smith (Chicago:
Haymarket Books, 2015).
[14] Bonefeld, Critical Theory, p.9, my emphasis.
[15] Werner Bonefeld, Capital as Subject and the Existence of Labour in Emancipating Marx: Open Marxism
3 (London: Pluto Press, 1995), pp. 190-191.
[16] Ibid., p. 196.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Werner Bonefeld, Negative dialectics in miserable times: Notes on Adorno and social praxis, in Journal
of Classical Sociology, 2012: 1 p. 130.
[19] Bonefeld, Critical Theory, p. 222.
[20] Hans-Jrgen Krahl, The Political Contradictions in Adornos Critical Theory in Telos, number 21, Fall
1974, p.164.
[21] Ibid., p.167.
[22] Theodor W. Adorno, Marginalia to Theory and Praxis, in Adorno, Critical Models (Columbia University
Press, 1998), p. 273. Adorno himself pointed out that this text was intended as part of a1969 lecture course
which ironically had to be suspended because of interruptions by students led by SDS. Ibid., p.126.
[23] Ibid., p. 269.
[24] Ibid., p.265.
[25] T. W. Adorno, Society in Salmagundi, No. 10-11, Fall 1969, Winter 1970, p.153.
[26] Ibid.