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

The forces of production have indeed increased to a degree unimaginable just a
century ago: today technological advances already make possible the elimination of
hunger, rural poverty, and life-threatening scarcity. 133 Yet this situation, which in Marx’s
view should necessarily lead to the overthrow of capitalist productive relations and to the
establishment of social relations that would allow for society’s productive capacity to be
rationally administered so as to meet all human needs, has not in fact led to such a
change. 134 In Adorno’s grim view, the relations of production and the profit motive have
managed not only to survive but also to squash the possibility of revolutionary change.
The question of how this is possible, how this could happen, is in fact for Adorno the
central question for critical theory today. 135
Adorno discusses at least three ways in which revolutionary change aimed at a
more “rational” structure of productive relations (i.e., a structure whose primary concern
133 See, for instance, Jeffrey Sachs’s expert study on how poverty and extreme hunger could be
eliminated with the use of economic and technological resources we already have in The End of Poverty:
Economic Possibilities for Our Time (New York: the Penguin Press, 2005).
134 Cf. Adorno, “Spätkapitalismus oder Industriegesellschaft?” in Gesammelte Schriften, 8. Band:
Soziologische Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969), 365:
Mehr als je sind die Produktivkräfte durch die Produktionsverhältnisse vermittelt; so vollständig
vielleicht, daß diese eben darum als das Wesen erscheinen; sie sind vollends zur zweiten Natur
geworden. Sie sind dafür verantwortlich, daß in irrem Widerspruch zum Möglichen die Menschen
in großen Teilen der Erde darben müssen. Selbst wo Fülle an Gütern herrscht, ist diese wie unter
einem Fluch.
English translation:
The forces of production are mediated more than ever by the relations of production, so
completely, perhaps, that the latter appear to be the essence; they have fully become second
nature. They are responsible for the fact that, in mad contradiction with what is possible, human
beings in large parts of the Earth must live in poverty. Even where goods are aplenty, they are as
if under a curse.
135 Adorno, Vorlesung über Negative Dialektik, in Nachgelassene Schriften, Vol. 16 (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 7. Vorlesung, pp. 71-84. English translation in Adorno, Lectures on Negative
Dialectics (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 7th Lecture, pp. 45-54. See also the opening sentences of Negative
Dialektik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970).
125