What follows is a rough translation a friend made for me of H.G. Backhaus’ notes from Adorno’s 1962 seminar on Marx. The notes are published as the appendix to Backhaus’s yet untranslated Dialektik der Wertform: Untersuchungen zur marxschen Ökonomiekritik A translation of this seminar was scheduled to appear in the Journal Common Sense in the issue after what became the last issue. A translation of The Dialectics of the Value Form will hopefully appear before the Neu Engels Lekture tosses the Neu Marx Lekture in the dustbin of history.

Backhaus and Reichelt credit this seminar, and their acquisition of a first edition of Capital, with motivating them to look into Marx’s methodology and his theory of value. Only a few of the essays that form Backhaus and Reichelt’s subsequent investigations have been translated. Most of them are in collections edited by Werner Bonefeld and are easily available online. (Hit me up if you want a list etc.)

Some will say that Backhaus and Reichelt would not have wasted their time if they knew that 32 years later the most important book of the 21st century would be published offering an entirely sui generis interpretation of Marx’s theory of value– Moishe Postone’s Time Labour and Social Domination. Others will say Adorno didn’t know dick about Marx, that his interpretation of Marx came from Lukacs or that he was an ideology critic. What follows will prove the latter wrong. The former clearly need to read Backahus and Reichelt.

(Since this two-year-old post suddenly seems to be getting a lot of new traffic, I thought I should mention that: (1) a translation of Backhaus is now in the works with the HM book series (2) A refined and properly edited translation of the following Adorno seminar is forthcoming in HM along with an introduction by me.)

Theodor W. Adorno on Marx and the basic concepts of sociological theory

From a seminar transcript in the summer semester 1962

On Popper’s “social nominalism:” In Popper, the concept of law is implicitly identified with the regularity of repeated occurrences. In truth, the concept of law is concerned with codifying a particular procedure in its structure. It is essential for positivism to hypostatize the division of labor in the sciences, thereby also rejecting this concept of law – when Popper argues, for instance, that historiography cannot verify the concept of law. Here, historiography is being isolated. Marx is accused of “economism.” Adorno: There are intellectual (geistige) relations that take on a life of their own such that, if they are offhandedly reduced to economic causes, one makes a mess of Marx. Instead, what matters – and this is our task – is to account for the conditions that result in the becoming independent of intellectual relations. The transition to independence itself is to be deduced from social dynamics.

Popper accuses Marx of “essentialism.” Marx would have sneered and commended himself as a nominalist (to turn Hegel from his head on his feet). Nevertheless I would say that Popper is right insofar as, in Marx, structural concepts are autonomous, without which social diversity cannot be thought, whereas Popper is essentially hostile to theory. Once the moment of the autonomy of the concept is given up, the possibility of theory is denied. Then theory is replaced with the demand that sociology, understood as a kind of agency (Agentur) of society, provide well ordered facts which are used in the respectively dominant praxis.

Wherefrom does Popper take his demand for an open society? After all, this is itself a general concept which appears like a shot. Here, a general concept is introduced rather naively and without thought (unreflektiert). “Humanity” already is a general concept with respect to individual human beings.

On the problem of social nominalism: Enlightenment recognizes more and more general concepts as fabricated by us. It wants to scrutinize/see through (durchschauen) the semblance of autonomy of what is made by us. It is man who produces everything that appears as autonomous in itself, it is thesei and not physei. Popper accuses Marx and Hegel of antiquated conceptual fetishism, but there is no consciousness (Bewusstsein) of any fact which is not mediated by consciousness (Bewusstsein).