CONTRADICTION, CRITIQUE, AND DIALECTIC IN ADORNO A ...

elations of production inherently leads to ever-greater inequality and antagonism
between the oppressed class of workers and the oppressing class of capitalists. 127
According to this Marxian analysis, which Adorno endorses, the apparently equal
relations that characterize the sphere of exchange are in fact predicated in un-equal,
inherently unfair and antagonistic relations of production. The sphere of market relations
is on this view not an autonomous sphere guided by an immanent principle of equality
among “persons,” as Hegel would have it, but is rather subservient to the principles of
capitalist production, which are in turn predicated on inequality and class struggle.
Let us now look at the second part of Adorno’s critique of Hegel’s conception of
civil society, namely that civil society’s subservience to the principle of exchange has the
result that civil society, rather than promoting the idea of equal dignity for all persons at
the heart of the notion of human rights, in fact diminishes the worth of individuals to the
point that they become dispensable. Adorno’s argument again originates in Marx—this
time in Marx’s analysis of the commodity form.
The commodity, Marx argues, is a form of wealth specific to the capitalist
system. 128 Its distinguishing characteristic is the replacement of the qualitative features
that make an object have use value by the quantitative features that make it a bearer of
exchange value. The commodity is an object produced not for the sake of its qualities,
but rather for the sake of exchange. The exchange value of commodities makes them all
measurable by the same quantitative standard regardless of the objects’ peculiar
127 See Ibid., 411-416 for Marx’s analysis of the relation between capital and wages. Marx argues
that, as capital increases, wages decrease overall: capital and wages stand in inverse proportion.
128 For Marx’s analysis of the commodity form, see Chapter I of Das Kapital, Vol. 1 (Berlin:
Dietz Verlag, 1953), 39-89.
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