The negativity of capital: The fate of the dialectic after the failure of Marxism
Mike Atkinson
Platypus Review 181 | November 2025
Bourgeois society and the dialectic
BOURGEOIS SOCIETY FIRST emerges in the Renaissance, but finds its political realization with the revolt of the Third Estate.1 “Society,” according to the Frankfurt School critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno quoting J. C. Bluntschli, “is a concept of the Third Estate.”2 They set about conceptualizing and politically realizing changes that had already come to pass in emergent bourgeois society’s outstripping of traditional civilization and its Great Chain of Being.
Labor, the association and activity of civil society that binds it together, was, for bourgeois thinkers, conceived as an exercise in freedom, the means of its realization and the emancipatory potential granted by society. Labor was taken to be the means of social transformation, the freedom not simply to be, but to become. For bourgeois thinkers, the social dynamic, the transformative potential of labor freed from feudal fetters was one of increasing perfectibility: the perfectibility of freedom through the corruption of and distancing from real human nature, as in Rousseau’s profoundly dialectical conception, and the growing maturation and enlightenment of society.
History for Hegel, the apotheotic bourgeois philosopher, was precisely the history of the progressive unfolding and coming to consciousness of freedom. He equated the idea of progress with the dialectical movement of society itself.3 Thus, bourgeois society discovered history, its own historicity, and therefore its own potential for self-conscious self-transformation. For the first time, humanity was able to understand itself in the present through the lens of progress, of freedom; the present related to itself through its relationship with history, seeing itself as intended in but no longer restricted by or identical with its own past. It is in this way that the past becomes historical. Where the present for premodern civilizations was a relation to itself through the cyclical reproduction of what had apparently always been and what must always be — passage through time as the process of preserving an essentially static condition — the present for modern, bourgeois civilization was seen as the site of the potential for transformation.
The notion of the withering away of the state, for example, associated so strongly today with Marxism, was an idea that emerged in radical bourgeois thought and was conceived of as a real possibility. In an interview with Platypus member D. L. Jacobs, David MacGregor, author of The Communist Ideal in Hegel and Marx (1984), Hegel, Marx, and the English State (1992), and Hegel and Marx after the Fall of Communism (1998), remarks that he was surprised to find that “when [Hegel] was about 23,” he and the poet Hölderlin “had decided that . . . the state would disappear and be replaced by poetry.”4
This emergent consciousness of freedom was bound up with the apparently unfettered productive capacity of mankind. This, they thought, had the potential to at the least considerably shorten the hours allotted to labor, and even to realize the principle more commonly associated with Marxism of: from each according to his ability; to each according to his need. As Adam Smith poetically describes it in The Wealth of Nations (1776):
In the first fire-engines [steam engines], a boy was constantly employed to open and shut alternately the communication between the boiler and the cylinder, according as the piston either ascended or descended. One of those boys, who loved to play with his companions, observed that, by tying a string from the handle of the valve which opened this communication to another part of the machine, the valve would open and shut without his assistance, and leave him at liberty to divert himself with his play-fellows. One of the greatest improvements that has been made upon this machine, since it was first invented, was in this manner the discovery of a boy who wanted to save his own labour.5
But when we look around today, it is difficult to say, with Hegel, that history is progress in the consciousness of freedom, and that the “slaughter-bench of history” is therefore meaningful. Instead of perfecting freedom, the history of capitalism seems instead to be the history of perfecting domination, with emancipation left unrealized, and past failures seeming only to ruffle the fabric of the progress of the victors, of the ruling class. Not freedom, but capital, is the culmination of world history as domination, and the object of the labors of mankind — although it also expresses its potential overcoming.
Rather than being yet another form of exploitation by a privileged group, capitalism bespeaks domination by a reified — that is, “thingified” — and anonymous social dynamic that is the product and aim of labor. When we talk about capital, we are not talking about money, or wealth, or capitalists, but a contradictory, self-undermining social relation that in turn dominates the society that produces it. We still live in bourgeois society, but reproduced in capitalist form. Capitalism is the self-contradiction, the self-negation of bourgeois society, through its process of realization, through its paradoxical historical dynamic.
Socialism and Marxism
Utopian socialism was borne out of the development of bourgeois society and the advent of the Industrial Revolution, with machine production revealing new emancipatory possibilities and the apparent injustice of bourgeois social relations. Utopian socialism was a phenomenon of bourgeois society, of its development; so too was the Left.
It was these early pangs of crisis and contradiction, the yet-unrealized potential of bourgeois society and its revolt, along with the concomitant demands for the “social republic” made by the emergent industrial working class and the associated socialist movements, that the young Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels set out to critically investigate. Marx was the foremost critic of socialism.
Through their critique of the utopian socialists as a phenomenon and symptom of bourgeois society in capitalism, in crisis, Marx and Engels developed “scientific” socialism: the discovery of the conditions of possibility and necessity for socialism in capitalism itself. In the developments they were witnessing first hand, including the emergence of the Left, Marx and Engels discovered that the dynamic of bourgeois society itself was tending towards the necessity of its own transcendence. Capitalism compels socialization.
Bourgeois society was to be a society of free laborers, each owning their own means of production and the product of their labor. Labor was the first property. The idea of private property was derived from labor rather than set up against it, and was conceived as a means not of domination and exploitation, but of emancipation for the laboring commoners from the unjust expropriation of their labor by the clergy and aristocracy. But it was becoming clear to Marx and Engels by the 1840s that the dynamic of bourgeois society was instead producing a new social class — the first social class as we understand the concept today: the proletariat.6
As far as bourgeois society is concerned, the proletariat, the subjective form of labor sans property, labor estranged from its product as capital, as a commodity, is a contradiction in terms. This is why Marx, after the liberal economist and historian Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi, uses the term that once referred to a social class of propertyless Roman citizens. The opposing bourgeoisie, then, the owners of industrial capital, were what Marx termed the non-working owners, the character-masks of capital as against labor. The class of the proletariat is not only a contradiction in terms; it is the living self-negation of bourgeois society, produced from out of its own dynamic, to which the proletariat is not external, but integral.
The proletariat is not only the negation of capitalism as a fixed and static phenomenon, but drives the continued and abortive self-abolition of capitalism through the production of surplus value that domination by capital demands. It therefore negates itself as a commodity. The increased productive capacity achieved during the Industrial Revolution undermined the social value of the labor of the individual worker, making workers, but not work, superfluous.7
All of the above describes the proletariat “in itself,” its “economic” activity. Marx and Marxism, through enacting the immanent dialectical critique of bourgeois society and its political economy,8 embodied the consciousness of its necessarily transitory character, of the necessity of its overcoming, and of the self-abolition of the proletariat as that class’s historical task: in short, the consciousness of the workers’ movement, in which “proletarian” and “class” became political categories.
Bourgeois social relations had become a fetter on the productive capacity of humanity. Marx recognized in capital a problem in history sui generis, and identified the first crisis of overproduction in human history, bringing with it new possibilities, for both emancipation and domination. Proletarianized labor undermines and devalues itself through its own labor, its own social activity. The proletariat in itself unconsciously enacts its self-abolition without realizing it politically — its task as a self-conscious class, a class for itself — and therefore without overcoming it. We suffer from our own unrealized potential freedom.
Bourgeois society in capitalism has forgotten that the aim of production was to be freedom in transformation, the freedom to become. Instead, humanity has come to serve capital. Capital in the form of industrial capital becomes not a means of social transformation but the end goal of production. Means and ends are reversed, and bourgeois society could be said to have produced its own opposite, the opposite of what had been intended by the revolt of the Third Estate: a new class society, perhaps the perfection of the class domination that had always existed in some form and as potential. Bourgeois society thus convicts itself as being the last form of human prehistory.
The self-dissolution of bourgeois society in capitalism embodied by the proletariat bears emancipatory potential, points beyond class society, beyond labor as a social relation, and therefore not simply beyond capitalism in the way that bourgeois society emerged from out of traditional civilization. Capitalism has come to point beyond prehistory, i.e., beyond class society, towards history proper: human destiny consciously driven by humanity, socialized as we are already compelled to be by capitalism.
It was recognized by Marx and the best Marxists that the politically organized proletariat would have to fulfil — positively realize — and negate capitalism, and itself, as the negation of bourgeois society and therefore of all prior prehistory. For instance, the expropriation of the means of production by the proletariat would be a part of the simultaneous realization and abolition — Selbstaufhebung9 — of itself as a commodity, at first by being able to set the terms of the sale of its labor, and later by transcending the exchange principle through fulfilling it in the expropriation of capital. If capitalism represents the conditions of possibility for socialism, this includes the existence of the proletariat as the bearer of that possibility.
Marxism meanwhile saw itself as the bearer of the historical consciousness of the proletariat, as itself a necessary ingredient in this dynamic, and could trace the history of its movement back through the Industrial Revolution to the days of the utopians. For Marxism, as best described by Lenin,10 the working class in itself unconsciously enacts the negation of bourgeois society and imposes the necessity of socialism, but the spontaneous consciousness of its historical-political task only goes so far. The workers’ movement stood in need of leadership by the advanced guard of the proletariat to safeguard historical class consciousness and to bring about the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Bonapartism and the dictatorship of the proletariat
The crisis in society once exemplified by the class struggle between capitalists and proletarians came to necessitate state intervention. The state as envisaged by the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau was to be the guarantor of civil liberties and the general will, meaning the preservation of society, through which freedoms beyond natural liberty are acquired. The general will is not the accumulation of all the individual wills in society, or a happy medium of all those wills, but the will of society itself to survive and preserve the freedom of individual subjects.
The state stepping into the fray during the crisis of society in the mid-19th century, while a regression in terms of the horizon of possibility for society, was also a product of that society’s simultaneous need to preserve and transcend itself. It can be seen as the self-contradiction and disintegration of the general will insofar as real bourgeois liberties were sacrificed for the sake of their formal preservation.
In his 1891 postscript to The Civil War in France, Engels describes the change that had taken place in the bourgeois form of the state:
Society had created its own organs to look after its common interests, originally through simple division of labor. But these organs, at whose head was the state power, had in the course of time, in pursuance of their own special interests, transformed themselves from the servants of society into the masters of society, as can be seen . . . not only in the hereditary monarchy, but equally also in the democratic republic.11
This transformation of the state was described by Marx and Marxism therefore as “Bonapartism,” after the rule of the Second Empire by Louis Bonaparte, Napoleon III, nephew of Napoleon I. The task of Bonapartism was to mediate and find compromise between the two warring classes — and, ultimately, to put down the proletariat in any uprising, thus ensuring the preservation of bourgeois society in capitalist form. To put it in a playfully dialectical way: in becoming more bourgeois, in becoming itself, society negated itself, became less bourgeois, in capitalism. Capitalism is statism, and Bonapartism “was the only form of government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, and the working class had not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the nation.”12
Just as, for Marxism, socialism is the dialectical opposite of capitalism, so the dictatorship of the proletariat conceived in contradistinction to the Bonapartist form of rule is best understood as its dialectical opposite. Both the Bonapartist state and the dictatorship of the proletariat emerge under the compulsion of a necessity issuing from the crisis of society. Thus, the dictatorship of the proletariat can be understood as both a regression from the horizon of bourgeois emancipation insofar as it has a necessarily authoritarian aspect, while also far outstripping that horizon.
Bonapartism answers this same necessity, but can be described as the Right wing of this tendency: it acts only to preserve what is, not to realize what ought to be. For Leszek Kołakowski, what separates Left from Right is not progress versus reaction; rather, the Left seeks to make good on new possibilities — and in so doing, the idea of a utopia becomes itself a tool — while the Right seeks to conserve what already exists, foreclosing further possibilities.13
The horizon of possibility for this society had regressed under the domination of capital. The bourgeoisie had retreated under the coattails of Louis Napoleon. It was left to the workers’ movement for socialism, the Left, to take up the cause of freedom, to carry through the revolution begun by the revolt of the Third Estate, whose secret telos14 is proletarian revolution. The bourgeois state in Bonapartist form no longer presents the possibility of its eventual withering away, but resigns itself to the continued need for the power of the state over society, the continued need for the governing of people, rather than, as in the case of the dictatorship of the proletariat, setting its sights on consigning that state of affairs to the history books and existing only for the sake of the administration of things.15
The dictatorship of the proletariat must therefore be understood not as a permanent state of affairs in which the proletariat would install itself as a new ruling class, but, only a temporary measure used to suppress the capitalist class and secure the gains of the revolution, just as the Bonapartist state is and was used for suppressing and controlling the working class, and cementing the rule of the bourgeoisie. The existence of the dictatorship of the proletariat would mean that while capitalism still exists, the problems of capital and the state have been taken up politically. Once it could comfortably be dispensed with, the state would wither away. However, the attempt to bring about the dictatorship of the proletariat, to enact the World Revolution, failed.
Negative dialectics
Despite the political failure of Marxism, the necessity immanent to capitalism has not gone away. Only, the working class no longer has nothing to lose but its chains. Because it could not be positively realized in socialism, the tendency towards immiseration, for example, has had to be circumvented by extra-economic measures undertaken by the Bonapartist state as a part of the integration of the proletariat into capitalism, and therefore the attempted neutralization of the threat it once posed.16
The resultant disappearance of the understanding of class as a political category — really, the disappearance of the proletariat as a class for itself, that is, a politically-organized class, while it still exists in itself as a social class — has rendered the Marxist understanding of the proletariat less and less lucid, such that many on the “Left” today are wont to reduce the question of social class to a question of rich and poor, the haves and the have-nots, or of the 99% and the 1%, to use the language of the Occupy movement, a high point of the Millennial Left.
Far from progress, from having left Marxism behind by transcending it, we have continued to fall further below its understanding of the necessity of socialism that capitalism is. We are not in an 1848 moment, let alone a 1917 moment. Regression has long been a problem for Marxism.
The Marxist understanding of the internal dynamic of capitalism that Marx describes as “a dynamic relationship driving towards resolution,” has therefore been problematized by Marxism’s failure as a political project and the subsequent retrogression of society and the regression of the Left.
For Marx and the best Marxists, who had an active, ascendant mass workers’ movement to deal with, who enjoyed the tangible possibility of the political victory of the workers, this social dynamic, driven by the workers’ movement, seemed to be driving towards socialism. Capitalism seemed to be actively driving beyond itself in the form of the self-conscious subject-object of history, the proletariat. The Marxists of the past, those belonging to Marxism as a political project during the mid-to-late-19th century and into the early part of the 20th, could, in a sense, be more Hegelian than we are allowed to be. While they maintained that the dialectic itself, rather than being identical with progress, had come to point beyond itself, proletarian revolution could still be understood to have arisen out of the dialectic of capitalism.
The “sharpening of the contradictions” to which ostensible “Marxists” today still love to refer was not the automatic “progress” of capitalism, where “progress” may be understood merely as a function of the passage of time, as an inevitability. Nor did it consist in the “acceleration” of this apparently automatic process, even where this process is equated with the disintegration of capitalism. Rather, the act of sharpening the contradictions was understood to be the effect of the revolutionary activity of the workers’ movement.
Absent class consciousness, the process may persist, but without the contradictions being adequately sharpened, and so not coming to consciousness. Capitalism continues to negate itself, compel socialization, abolish private property, and undermine the bourgeois nation state without these things being realized politically. Absent the workers’ movement for socialism, the same energy that would be driven into transcending capitalism is instead channeled into reproducing it.
Marxism had failed by around 1919 with the murder of the communists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht during the German Revolution, at the hands of the Freikorps and under the orders of the then-ruling Social Democratic Party of Germany, of which they had been an integral part prior to the Party’s vote for war credits. It is this uprising that the critical theorist and friend and teacher to Adorno, Walter Benjamin, credits as being the last gasp of the revolution, the last gasp of the truly historical consciousness embodied by Marxism. Soon after came a regression, a reification of the concept of “progress” that proved fatal. Benjamin writes:
In the idea of classless society, Marx secularized the idea of messianic time. And that was a good thing. It was only when the Social Democrats elevated this idea to an “ideal” that the trouble began. The ideal was defined in Neo-Kantian doctrine as an “infinite [unendlich] task.” And this doctrine was the school of philosophy of the Social Democratic party. Once the classless society had been defined as an infinite task, the empty and homogeneous time was transformed into an anteroom . . . in which one could wait for the emergence of the revolutionary situation with more or less equanimity. In reality, there is not a moment that would not carry with it its revolutionary chance — provided only that it is defined in a specific way, namely as the chance for a completely new resolution of a completely new problem [Aufgabe]. For the revolutionary thinker, the peculiar revolutionary chance offered by every historical moment gets its warrant from the political situation. But it is equally grounded . . . in the right of entry which the historical moment enjoys vis-à-vis a quite distinct chamber of the past, one which up to that point has been closed and locked. The entrance into this chamber coincides in a strict sense with political action, and it is by means of such entry that political action . . . reveals itself as messianic. (Classless society is not the final goal of historical progress but its frequently miscarried, ultimately [endlich] achieved interruption.) . . . Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps . . . revolutions are an attempt by the passengers . . . to activate the emergency brake.”17
In these apparent deviations from orthodox Marxism — Benjamin claimed to be an orthodox Marxist — lies the key to recognizing what separates our time from Marx’s, what necessitates the intervention of the likes of Adorno and his thesis of negative dialectics: what becomes of the dialectic of capitalism absent the workers’ movement for socialism. It is the dialectic itself having become implicated in the wake of that failure, necessitating the dialectical critique of itself, the Marxist critique of Marxism.
The progress that was to result in a successful World Revolution for socialism, after the failure of that movement, regressed into being the continued “progress” of capitalism, its continued self-negation and reconstitution. This is what Benjamin describes as “progression through homogeneous, empty time,” the progress and apparent eternity of prehistory, and the regression of the struggle for emancipation. It is this that Benjamin is referring to when he describes the interruption of historical progress — in the name of genuine progress. The point is no longer to “progress” history, to submit to its dynamic, but to throw on the brakes.
The meaning Marx and Engels gave to this dynamic is something we no longer have the luxury of falling back on. Progress itself had become regressive, and it is the failure of Marxism that produced this condition we have yet to find a way out of.18 Bourgeois society has undergone a retrogression, in capitalism, to a premodern temporality, the temporal experience of the cyclical. It remains “the old in distress,” as Adorno puts it, “in its hour of need,” without its historical character being evident.19 The present is ahistorical in its immediacy, has forgotten its own historical character — a forgetfulness that is itself historical.
Society disintegrates under the dead weight of historical potential that is not being realized, and the state is compelled more and more to intervene. Progress can no longer be equated, as in Hegel, with the dialectic itself. The progress of capitalism has shown itself to be the blind transience of the nature it thought it was the process of leaving behind. Instead, genuine progress has come to lie in the possibility of the interruption of progress. As Adorno puts it in Negative Dialectics: “Dialectics is the ontology of the wrong state of things. The right state of things would be free of it: neither a system nor a contradiction.”20
If we understand the progressive movement of capitalism into a homogeneous future to be one that rides over and leaves as a mere fact of history the attempt to change the world, to realize possibilities we all tacitly realize are still latent today, progressivism itself appears Right-wing, conservative. Past attempts at emancipation are allotted their place in the historical continuum, and their failure is accepted at face value; the judgement of history is accepted: the Left, Marxism, socialism, emancipation, all have simply failed, forever. The Chartist movement, for instance, on which Efraim Carlebach gave a teach-in in Manchester a couple of years ago,21 came to a dead end. Carlebach pointed out that on the huge timeline hanging on the wall of the People’s History Museum in Manchester, the Chartist movement is an inconspicuous little branch off the “main” timeline that came to nought.
Therefore we cannot posit even the history of domination as some kind of cynical “meaning” of history, history as identical with itself, with its own course. Even this would be too comforting. One’s theory of history is one’s theory of the present;, to have a conception of the history of the Left and its failures is to have an account of how its present state came to be.
Our present world and its Left are constituted by the failure of Marxism and our continued inability to surmount that failure, often inadvertently affirming the course of history and contributing to the reconstitution of capitalism. We are products of failure. Marxism is dead, but it is not gone: it haunts us, perhaps most of all in our inability to remember it. As Adorno writes in Negative Dialectics: “The fact that history has rolled over certain positions will be respected as a verdict on their truth content only by those who agree with Schiller that “world history is the world tribunal.” What has been cast aside but not absorbed theoretically will often yield its truth content only later. It festers as a sore on the prevailing health; this will lead back to it in changed situations.”22
If capitalism remains the collective, albeit unconscious, product of the working class; if the working class produces, on a global scale, its own conditions of domination, albeit under compulsion; it still bears the responsibility, actually the only real possibility, of transforming that situation. There is still hope.
While Marxism discovered the conditions of possibility for socialism in capitalism, this must be understood to include the constitution of the industrial working class and its mass socialist movement, as well as the constitutive role it plays in capitalism. Absent this, capitalism is catastrophe. The same energy that goes into reconstituting capitalism could be used to reconstitute the workers’ movement for socialism, but it isn’t.
The workers’ movement for socialism is dead. The means of realizing capitalism’s latent potential no longer exist in self-conscious, political form. Those conditions of possibility are positively decomposing. And yet, for all the failure, for all the backwardness of our own moment, for all the seeming impossibility of redemption, it nonetheless remains the case that progress is only possible through the development of “a self-conscious global subject.”23
The task of constituting this global subject, which once took the form of the mass workers’ party for socialism (and therefore was not identical with the working class in itself), remains — even if there is nobody equal to it. |P
1 With thanks to Justin Spiegel.
2 Theodor W. Adorno, “Society,” in Aspects of Sociology, trans. John Viertel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 144. Adorno quotes J. C. Bluntschli, “Gesellschaft und Gesellschaftswissenschaft,” in Deutsches Staats-Wörterbuch, vol. 4, eds. J. C. Bluntschli and R. Brater (Stuttgart: Expedition des Staats-Wörterbuchs, 1859), 246–51.
3 Adorno notes that for Hegel’s philosophy of history, progress defines “the scope of what is dialectical,” i.e., the dialectical movement of history itself is for Hegel identical with progress. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Lecture 17,” in History and Freedom: Lectures 1964–1965, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 158.
4 D. L. Jacobs, “The communist ideal in Hegel and Marx: An interview with David MacGregor,” Platypus Review 153 (February 2023), <https://platypus1917.org/2023/02/01/the-communist-ideal-in-hegel-and-marx-an-interview-with-david-macgregor/>.
5 Adam Smith, “Of the Division of Labour,” in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976), 13–14.
6 See Theodor W. Adorno, “Reflections on Class Theory,” in Can One Live After Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone, et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 93.
7 Max Horkheimer, “The Authoritarian State,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, eds. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Urizen Books, 1978), 95.
8 “Immanent dialectical critique” means measuring bourgeois society against its own concept and discovering, through its contradiction, how it points beyond itself.
9 [German] Self-overcoming, self-completion, self-negation, etc.
10 See V. I. Lenin, “The Spontaneity of the Masses and the Consciousness of the Social-Democrats,” in What Is To Be Done?: Burning Questions of our Movement (1902).
11 Friedrich Engels, “On the 20th Anniversary of the Paris Commune” (1891), in Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/postscript.htm>.
12 Karl Marx, “The Paris Commune,” in The Civil War in France.
13 Leszek Kołakowski, “The Concept of the Left,” in Towards a Marxist Humanism: Essays on the Left Today, trans. Jane Zielonko Peel (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1969), 71–72.
14 [Ancient Greek] End, goal, purpose, etc.
15 Friedrich Engels, “Theoretical,” in “Part III: Socialism,” in Anti-Duhring (1877). See also Lenin quoting this in “Class Society and the State,” in The State and Revolution: The Marxist Theory of the State & the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution (1917).
16 See Adorno, “Reflections on Class Theory,” 103; and Theodor W. Adorno, “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society? The Fundamental Question of the Present Structure of Society,” in Can One Live After Auschwitz?, 114–15.
17 Walter Benjamin, “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History,’” in Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938–1940, eds. Howard Eiland, et al., trans. Edmund Jephcott, et al. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2006), 401–02.
18 Adorno provides an excellent illustration of this in “Lecture 18,” in History and Freedom, 170. There he describes how the principle of the exchange of equivalents has always violated itself — one party has always received more — and that it was through this violation, this self-contradiction, that bourgeois society progressed. It is only in this way that exchange can even be a dynamic, can be productive; the pure exchange of equivalents would cancel itself out. However, with the advent of the Industrial Revolution and the predominance of wage labor, the socialization of labor, the production and appropriation of surplus value, etc., industrial capital — the appropriated product of industrial labor — came to dominate society itself. This is how Adorno demonstrates the point made in “Lecture 17” that progress itself is dialectical and has produced regression through the movement of progression. Self-contradiction itself, as the bearer of progress, has come to contradict itself through producing a static, barbaric condition: capitalism. Genuine progress could however take place through regression by fulfilling without violating the exchange of equivalents, once and for all, in the expropriation of capital by the proletariat. This would thus be the negation of the negation — that is, the negation of capitalism which is itself the negation of bourgeois society — and its transcendence. “Where bourgeois society satisfies the concept it cherishes of itself it knows no progress; where it knows progress it sins against its own law in which this offence is already present, and with this inequality it perpetuates the wrong that progress is supposed to transcend. This wrong, however, is also the condition of possible justice. The fulfilment of the contract of exchange, whose terms are constantly being broken, would converge with its abolition; exchange would disappear if the objects exchanged were truly equivalent. Genuine progress is not simply quite different from exchange; it would be exchange worthy of the name.” From this standpoint, the regression from bourgeois society that capitalism is could be taken up as also being progress beyond it.
19 Adorno, “Reflections on Class Theory,” 95.
20 Theodor W. Adorno, “The Antagonistic Entirety,” in “Introduction,” in Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 2003), 11. It is also important to note here that Marx too foresaw passage beyond the dialectic, even in his optimism about history. See also Hilmar Tillack’s notes, which are appended to Adorno, “Lecture 13” in History and Freedom, 117: “in contrast to the prevailing belief that Marx had a positive view of the natural laws of society and that one needs only to obey them to obtain the possibility of the right kind of society and that one needs only to obey them to obtain the possibility of the right kind of society — in contrast to this belief, Marx wishes to get beyond them into the kingdom of freedom i.e., to escape from the notion of history as natural history.” While Hegel equated progress with this dynamic itself, with the endless perfectibility of human society, Marx was optimistic about the dynamic of history insofar as that dynamic itself seemed to be passing beyond itself in the hands of the proletarian movement for socialism. Thus, Benjamin’s reversal of the image of the locomotive of history is assuredly not the disagreement it may appear to be on the surface, but is entirely faithful to Marx in changed conditions.
21 A recording of the teach-in is available at <https://archive.org/details/chartism-teach-in>.
22 Adorno, “Relation to Left-wing Hegelianism,” in Negative Dialectics, 144.
23 Theodor W. Adorno, “Progress,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 144.
