Translation: Excerpts From The ISR Seminar on Needs (1942)

With a note on the criterion of early critical theory

Note: On Extant translations. The most famous entry is (deservedly) Adorno’s “Theses on Need,” which have been translated a number of times. (Below, I’ve included Martin Shuster and Iain Macdonald’s 2017 translation of the ‘Theses’ available through the New Institute of Social Research.) More recently, David Fernbach translated Adorno’s “Theses” into English, which is published alongside a translation of Pollock’s “Presentation” and the following “Discussion” (6/30/1942) by Rodney Livingstone, with a brief introduction to the context and significance of the “Seminar” for New Left Review (NLR 128, Mar/Apr 2021).¹ Michael Winkler and Richard Wolin have also translated the first of the discussions, on Ludwig (no relation to Herbert) Marcuse’s “Presentation” on Need and Culture in Nietzsche (7/14/1942), in full, with an introduction, for Constellations (2001).²

—James/Crane (3/3/2023)

---

Table of Contents:

Materials from the Seminar on Needs (1942)

I. On the Problem of Needs (1942), Horkheimer

II. Adorno’s “Theses on Need” (1942)

III. On the Unity and Separation of Needs [Summary Notes from Discussion No. 2 (7/28/1942), by Gretel Adorno, Theodor Adorno, & Frederick Pollock]

IV. Group Discussion of Horkheimer’s “On the Problem of Needs” and Adorno’s “Theses on Need”

[Notes of the Minutes from Discussion No. 3 (8/11/1942), by Gretel Adorno, Theodor Adorno, & Frederick Pollock]

IV. Music and Milk [Excerpts from the Discussion No. 4 (8/25/1942), by Gretel Adorno, Theodor Adorno, & Frederick Pollock]

Appendix 1: Excerpts from the “Discussion” of Pollock’s “Presentation” on the ‘Theory of Needs’ (6/30/1942)

Note: “Classless Society” as the criterion of early critical theory.

---

Materials from the Seminar on Needs (1942)

I. On the Problem of Needs (1942), Horkheimer

(Remarks for a discussion of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World [1932].)³

Thesis I. The juxtaposition of material and ideal needs proves untenable upon closer inspection. The unchanging adherence to such cissions [Scheidungen] leads to serious theoretical and political errors. One thereby accepts the static conceptual foundations on which the books of Huxley, Madelung and others are based.⁴

Thesis II. To speak generally, the ideal needs one might strive to fulfill are nothing other than the social form, the manner and mode, in which material needs are to be satisfied. When the demand for a pint of milk is raised,⁵ even from the mouth of a government official, it contains a number of “formal” elements, which are not expressly stated: that the milk is delivered in a clean container, that it contains no dangerous bacteria, that it has a certain fat content, etc. If one stuck strictly to the wording, the demand could be fulfilled; nevertheless, the child would be cheated. Dialectics recognizes that it is not only [elements such as] the nutritional value, the kind of container, and so forth, which play a role in whether the child is cheated. It is also crucial, for instance, that the father and mother do not suffer under the burden of senseless labor, and the child under the fear of losing them to it; that the child lives in an orderly house, that they have a good family doctor, that there is no exploitative [and terroristic]⁶ domination—which would necessarily be reflected in the very faces and being of the parents, and throughout the child’s whole environment, and which, in the long run, would spoil the milk so much more than a dirty container ever could. The social order is as much a part of the milk as its fat content. So long as one does not claim that, instead of milk, one merely drinks its chemical formula, imposing the cut between material and ideal needs remains highly relative.

Thesis Ill. If one considers human beings in isolation, and purely as living beings, needs may be divided along a scale of degrees. They will die sooner if they have nothing to eat than they will if they have only boiled rice. They will die sooner if they only have boiled rice than they will if the rice is mixed with raw fruit. They will die sooner in a dark, damp pit than they will in breathable air; sooner if they work in a lead mine than they will if they work in a movie studio; sooner in a ramshackle hut where a new accident befalls them every day than they will in a factory with appropriate safeguards; sooner with fourteen-hour working days, without holidays, and in constant fear of losing their job than they will with proper leisure time and the prospect of carefree old age; sooner from monotonous labor, under which whole portions of their physiological apparatus atrophy, than they will with alternating, interesting kinds of employment—all of this, naturally, in relation to statistical probability and the law of large numbers. Such a hierarchy is by no means meaningless; socialism must also be scientific in this respect. However, in application to politics, this hierarchy is complicated by a number of aspects—for example, in that a monotone, dark, and hopeless existence with an agonizing end, no matter how long it lasts due to minimal hygienic conditions, is not, without further ado, the most desirable life. The critical complication lies in the social nature of human beings. Even the struggle to fulfill the most primary of needs is largely illusory when linked to the maintenance of conditions which, as a rule, give rise to national and international catastrophes in which millions upon millions of human beings perish. The need to bring an end to these catastrophes, and, therefore, to transform the order which causes them, remains invisible so long as we only consider human beings in isolation, merely as living beings; and yet, this need is not at all ‘secondary,’ ‘tertiary,’ ‘higher,’ ‘nobler,’ or more ‘spiritual’ than the natural necessities of life.

Thesis IV. Whenever a distinction is made between material and ideal needs, one must undoubtedly insist on the fulfillment of the material needs, for, as the above theses have shown, social transformation is implicit in this demand. In a manner of speaking, it contains reason [Vernunft]. What is demanded is nothing other than social relations which provide all human beings with the best possible living conditions: the abolition [Abschaffung] of socially conditioned suffering. The emphasis on isolated, ideal demands, however, leads to actual nonsense. One cannot legitimately demand the right to yearning, to transcendent knowledge [Wissen], to a high-stakes life and then, on top of this, demand the liquidation of radio advertisements and drugstores. The struggle against mass culture consists in uncovering its connection to the badness of domination. It is laughable to accuse chewing gum of impeding one’s inclination towards metaphysics, but it could probably be shown that Wrigley’s profits and his Chicago palace rest upon the social function of reconciling human beings with and dissuading them from the critique of bad social relations. What ought to be made clear is not that chewing gum has done harm to metaphysics, but, to the contrary, that chewing gum itself is metaphysics. We don’t criticize mass culture because it offers them too much, or because it makes their lives too secure—this we leave to Lutheran theology—but because it offers human beings too little of too little, because whole class strata in- and outside of it live in appalling misery, because through it human beings are brought to terms with such injustice—in short, because it ensnares the whole world in a state of affairs from which one can expect only, in one moment, gigantic catastrophes, and, in the next, the conspiracy among manipulative elites to establish a hellish condition of peace.

Thesis V. The so-called ideal, as form of the material, must be politically emphasized particularly where the material demands in the ruling society are curtailed [beschnitten] and their fulfillment is implemented as a means of corruption and diversion to split [Spaltung] the dominated, and thus become “spirit” themselves. By no means does this issue from the Lords of Industry alone, but just as much from other rackets with an interest in domination. In the worker’s movement, there are constant conflicts between the interests of individuals and those of the whole. The attempt to absorb the more universal [allgemeinen] interests through the limited satisfaction of more particular [partikularer] interests must be countered by, among other things, proof that, in the long run, the interests of the individual can only be satisfied in the satisfaction of the more universal, and that this means actual transformation. The emphasis of this point of view often appears, when compared to more immediate interests, to be an ideal, theoretical moment. In practical politics as much as in theory, it has to be demonstrated that particular interests are at least as abstract, ephemeral, and ideal as the so-called spiritual or intellectual [geistigen] ones. The exclusive fixation on the isolated, material demands of individual groups can be just as ideologically misguided as the appeal to Christian Science. On the other hand, however, the calls for yearning, justice, and freedom first acquire their true meaning only in relation to the configuration of human community.⁷

Thesis VI. Observations such as those in Huxley’s book are not, in themselves, childish—on the contrary!—but only become so when made in isolation. If placed in the context of a political critique of the present, untrue might become true, which, of course, has very little to do with Huxley himself. Dialectical thinking cannot be indifferent to the specific form of dehumanization which is brought to bear upon human beings under monopoly. This form is a continuation of the reification which is essential to capitalism. The doctrine that the human being has become another “appendage of the machine”⁸ must be differentiated, developed, and applied to historical questions anew on the ground of social relations today. This might, for example, explain more than a little about the history of German social democracy, not to mention the American worker’s movement. As wrong as it would be to attack the individual phenomena of mass culture for its own sake, it is just as crucial to recognize and determine these phenomena as knots in the net which binds human beings together for the coming calamity.

---

II. Adorno’s “Theses on Need” (1942)

[translated by Martin Shuster and Iain Macdonald (2017)]

Thesis I. Need is a social category; nature as “drive” is contained within it. But the social and natural moments of need cannot be split up into secondary and primary in order to set up some sort of ranking of satisfactions. Hunger, when understood as a natural category, can be sated by the grasshoppers and mosquito-cakes eaten by many uncivilized peoples. To satisfy the concrete hunger of civilized peoples, however, implies that what they have to eat does not disgust them; in this disgust and its opposite is reflected the whole of history. So it goes with each need. Each drive is so socially mediated that its natural side never appears immediately, but always only as socially produced. The appeal to nature in relation to this or that need is always merely the mask of denial and domination.

Thesis II. The distinction between superficial and basic needs is a socially produced illusion. So-called superficial needs reflect the labor process that makes human beings into “appendages of the machine,”⁹ and which compels them, outside of work, to limit themselves to reproducing the commodity of labor power. Such needs are the marks of a state of affairs that forces its victims into flight, while at the same time firmly keeping them under control, and in such a way that the escape always degenerates into a frantic repetition of the state of affairs from which they fled. What is bad in so-called superficial needs is not their superficiality, the concept of which itself presupposes a dubious inwardness. Rather, these needs — which are not really needs at all — are bad insofar as they are directed towards a fulfilment that cheats us out of this very fulfilment. The social mediation of need — as mediated by capitalist society — has reached a point where need comes into contradiction with itself. Critique must take aim at this contradiction, and not at any given hierarchy of values and needs.

Thesis III. So-called basic needs are, for their part, to a large extent products of the process of denial, and fulfil a deflecting function. To play such basic needs off against superficial ones is already questionable because both have long been taken over by the monopoly. The Beethoven symphony conducted by Toscanini is no better than the next popular film to come along, and anything with Bette Davis is on its own a synthesis [of this process]. It is precisely this synthesis that is deserving of the most extreme suspicion.

Thesis IV. The theory of need is faced with considerable difficulties. First, it calls attention to the social character of need and therefore to the satisfaction of needs in their most immediate, most concrete form. It cannot lay claim a priori to any distinction between good and bad, genuine and created, right [richtig] and wrong [falsch] needs. However, it must also recognize that existing needs are themselves, in their present form, produced by class society. No neat distinction can be made between a need proper to humanity and one that would be a consequence of repression. The danger exists that domination might come to reside permanently [die Gefahr einer Einwanderung der Herrschaft] within human beings through a monopolization of their needs. This is not a heretical belief that could be exorcised by excommunication; it is a real tendency of late capitalism. This danger does not consist in the possibility of post-revolutionary barbarism, but in the fact that total society [totale Gesellschaft] is an impediment to revolution. Dialectical theory must stand fast against this danger and all the contradictions inherent to need. It is able to do so only by recognizing each and every question of need in its concrete interrelation with the whole of the social process, as opposed to appealing to need in general, be it to sanction, regulate, or even to suppress the legacy of its badness. Today, under monopoly conditions, what is decisive is how individual needs relate to the continued existence of monopoly. The unfolding of this relation is an essential theoretical concern.

Thesis V. Needs are not static. The static appearance [die Statik]¹⁰ of needs — namely, that they seem to have taken on the static fixation with the reproduction of perennial sameness — is itself just a reflection of material production, which assumes a stationary character with the elimination of the free market and competition, along with the simultaneous perpetuation of class domination. When needs no longer appear static, they will take on a completely different aspect. The solution to the contradiction of needs is itself contradictory. If production were immediately, unconditionally and unrestrictedly reorganized according to the satisfaction of needs — even and especially those produced by capitalism — then the needs themselves would be decisively transformed. The opacity of [the distinction between] genuine [echtem] and false need belongs essentially to class domination. In class domination, the reproduction of life and its oppression form a unity whose law is on the whole transparent, but whose individual shape remains, however, opaque. Were there no longer a monopoly, it would quickly emerge that the masses do not “need” the trash and impoverished sense of quality that cultural monopolies supply in their practicality. The notion, for example, that cinema is as necessary as housing and food for the reproduction of labor power is “true” only in a world where people are organized by the reproduction of labor-power, a world that also forces their needs into harmony with the profit and domination interests of employers. Putting this notion to the test today would already seem to presuppose the possibility of the radical transformation of the world. The thought that a revolutionary society would clamor for Hedy Lamarr’s histrionics or Campbell’s awful soup is absurd. The better the soup, the more enjoyable the renunciation of Lamarr.

Thesis VI. It is unclear why the whole present cultural bustle should continue in a classless society. It is no doubt absurd that the capitalist crisis should destroy the means of production that serve needs, yet the idea that cinema and radio — which serve scarcely any need at all at the moment — will mostly fall away in a classless society is in no way considered absurd. The inherently contradictory character of numerous needs will lead to their disintegration once they cease to be foisted on us from above through direct or indirect terror. It is fetishistic to think that the state of the technological forces of production require, in and of themselves, the continuing satisfaction and reproduction of illusory needs, which will dissolve along with capitalist society. Not all wheels have to keep turning in a democracy based on workers’ councils: the demand itself implies a fear of the unemployed, who will disappear along with capitalist exploitation.

Thesis VII. The question of the immediate satisfaction of need is not to be posed in terms of social and natural, primary and secondary, correct and false; rather, it coincides with the question of the suffering of the vast majority of all humans on earth. If we produced that which all humans now most urgently need, then we would be relieved of inflated social-psychological concerns about the legitimacy of their needs. Such concerns arise only when boards and commissions are established and empowered to classify needs, and when, under the rallying cry of “man shall not live by bread alone,” they decide to give us a portion of our bread ration — which is always too small — in the form of Gershwin records.

Thesis VIII. The demand for production solely in view of the satisfaction of needs belongs to prehistory, to a world in which production is not organized according to need, but in view of profit and the establishment of domination, and in which lack therefore prevails. If lack disappeared, then the relation between need and satisfaction would itself be transformed. In capitalist society, the compulsion to produce in view of needs that are mediated and fixed by the market is one of the chief means of keeping people in check. Nothing may be thought, written, done or made that would go beyond this society, which is kept in power largely through the needs of those who are at its mercy. It is inconceivable that the compulsion to satisfy needs should continue to exist as a fetter on productive force in classless society. Bourgeois society has for the most part failed to meet its immanent needs, but for that reason production has been kept under its spell, precisely through the reference to needs. It was as practical as it was irrational. The classless society, which will abolish the irrationality of the entanglement of production and profit, will satisfy needs and likewise abolish the practical spirit that still asserts itself in the aimlessness [Zweckferne] of the bourgeois notion of l’art pour l’art [art for art’s sake]. It will sublate [aufheben] not only the bourgeois antagonism between production and consumption, but also their bourgeois unity. To be useless [unnütz] will then no longer be shameful. Conformity will lose its sense. Productivity in its genuine, undisfigured sense will, for the first time, have a real effect on need: not by assuaging unsatisfied need with useless things, but rather because satisfied need will make it possible to relate to the world without knocking it into shape through universal usefulness [Nützlichkeit]. If classless society promises the end of art by sublating the tension between the actual and the possible, then at the same time it also promises the beginning of art, the useless [das Unnütze], whose intuition tends towards reconciliation with nature because it is no longer in the service of usefulness [Nutzen] to the exploiters.

---

III. On the Unity and Separation of Needs

[Summary Notes from Discussion No. 2 (7/28/1942), by Gretel Adorno, Theodor Adorno, & Frederick Pollock]¹¹

[Presentation]

Huxley's thesis is that industrial society is compelled for economic reasons to unfetter the productive forces ever more recklessly, and thereby to the abolition [Abschaffung] of crises and material hardship [Not]. The abolition of material hardship is synonymous with the abolition of culture, for culture is grounded on the stabilization of material hardship, which finds its correlate in the life of the “productive imagination,”¹² which renders the idea [Idee] in actuality. Culture is essentially transcendent relative to that which exists; if, however, that which exists fulfills the needs of human beings, the need to transcend it falls away. The progress of industrial society leads to the abolition of transcendence, and, therefore, to the abolition of religion, art, science (with the exception of technology), etc. This thesis presupposes the unity and structuredness of human needs, —not their separation, as has repeatedly been asserted in this discussion. Class society has led to the separation of material and spiritual needs, and subsequently established a fundamental connection between the two, such that the latter are determined through the former. “Spirit” is constituted through the existence of limitation and lack, and is so constituted that limitation and lack are inherent in all of its forms. This is not a natural, but a historical-social state of affairs. Salvation of existing culture can only occur at the cost of maintaining existing hardship. If the goal of the abolition of classes is the elimination of hardship, then the dissolution of existing culture is not too high a price to reach it. Huxley’s meanness lies in this—that he thinks the price too high. Existing society has been described as the “system of needs.”¹³ This concept, when taken seriously, implies that the society which sublates [aufhebt] the existing one can no longer be characterized as such a system of needs. The introduction of infinitely different, infinitely new needs only prolongs the principle of existing society.¹⁴

[Discussion of the Presentation]

Adorno: I must say—a number of things in the presentation strike me as extremely interesting. Not for a critique of socialism, but as a critique of the constitution of that society which has, perhaps, reached a stage at which socialism has been cut off. Huxley imagines that the Brave New World he denounces will be set up for the sake of maintaining the gear-works; that its production will not be for the sake of human beings. For all its economic vagueness, the critique applies to state capitalism. Its true seriousness lies not in the discussion of happiness, but in the fact that capitalism has, today, reached a stage in which the needs of human beings are manipulated to such a degree that the dominated are in danger, in danger of no longer having the capacity to resist domination. Huxley’s soma-pills are the mythologization of mass art, based as it is on the fear of losing one’s existence—for in the age of monopoly capitalism, there is always the danger that society will absorb its victims, that state capitalism will produce human beings themselves in a much more far-reaching sense. How is anyone supposed to react to this when the world has, in fact, developed in such a way that none are conscious of suffering, when the world itself has become ideology, and this ideology has become stronger than sin, love, and death?

Horkheimer: Capitalism has not always said it wants to fulfill needs. We were told at university that scarcity [Kargheit] could never truly be overcome; that it is ridiculous to draw up utopias in which every child can have their pint of milk. And that was when the masses were a much greater danger to capitalism than they are today. It is not because of tactics or the pressure of the masses that the situation has changed, but because it has since become apparent that the greatest corporate interests [Konzerne] can take society into their own hands, which has been demonstrated by the grand experiment of fascism. Naturally, one cannot speak of meeting material needs in the present moment, but can’t capitalism meet socialism precisely on these grounds? Capitalism may, after all, give a pint of milk to the majority, but then a minority will remain without. If the capitalists come to an understanding with the CIO and AF of L, although many will be satisfied, the injustice will continue. The satisfied will say: “So all of a sudden, we’re supposed to have compassion for foreign peoples. You socialists have always taught that the most important thing of all is that our needs are satisfied, and now the time has come.” […] Today, we must ask: how do we demand material needs be met? All of the mechanisms of capital work to confuse the tendencies within the proletariat oriented towards the satisfaction of needs. The mass culture of the present comes down to this: to talk everyone into believing they have only material needs, precisely those which are fulfillable by the present system. […]

---

IV. Group Discussion of Horkheimer’s “On the Problem of Needs” and Adorno’s “Theses on Need”

[Notes of the Minutes from Discussion No. 3 (8/11/1942), by Gretel Adorno, Theodor Adorno, & Frederick Pollock]¹⁵

A. On ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ needs and values

ad Huxley: Looking into the future, Huxley’s worry is that of someone who has something to lose and something to protect—namely, culture. First, however, one would have to prove it something worth protecting. Perhaps suffering was once, socially speaking, a motor of culture. Today, it is sheer barbarism; not a motor, but a brake. At any rate, it is highly problematic to project the psychology of Louis Philippe’s Philistine [Spießer]¹⁶ into the year 5000. Today, we speak of art, although it no longer exists.

ad Theses: In the “Theses” [viz., Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s], there was no distinction made between need and the satisfaction of need. There are also genuine biological needs; there are even distinctions in value between individual needs, and we need a measure of value [Wertmaßstab]. So-called material needs must not be considered unworthy. Today, they are a means of mass domination. So long as natural needs are not satisfied, they are so strong they suppress all others; but when they are satisfied, other needs come to the fore, such as the need for culture. But what hierarchy should these kinds of needs have in a socialist order?

Counter-objection: ‘Pure nature’ may not be determined by any one need—e.g., ‘power’ and ‘art’ are both social categories. ‘Art’ always refers to a representation of universality [Vorstellung von Allgemeinheit]. To speak of ‘the natural need for art’ would be to meaninglessly expand the concept of the natural.

Objection: There is something like spiritual hunger, which one could describe as something higher. In our society, art is brought down upon the masses as a narcotic. But, alongside this, there is still something of a principle of value [Wertprinzip] to it. In the critique of the measure of value, all art refers to that which is characteristic of the existing order of society. Whenever we encounter something like ‘higher’ needs, we must always ask: what stands behind them?

Objection: The sense for art [Kunstsinn] is only thinkable at all when thought together with the “pint of milk.”¹⁷ Culture begins with food. The ‘lower’ needs refer to culture; the ‘higher’ to steaks. We need “Strength Through Butter,” not “Strength through Joy.”¹⁸

Conclusion: Two opposing intuitions [Anschauungen]: the one represents an eidetic intuition [Wesensschau] of values which cannot be derived from social reality;¹⁹ the other contests this theory of value.

B. Art in our Time

1. The kind of preservationist culture, as represented by Huxley and Toscanini,²⁰ enters into contradiction [Widerspruch] with the content [Gehalt] bound to a determinate stage of culture [Kulturstufe]. Toscanini makes Beethoven into a kind of Hedy Lamarr. Something similar may be shown in all of the phenomena of elevated culture. It even applies, for example, to [Max] Reinhardt’s Shakespeare productions.²¹ Classical art is beginning to become absolutely uninterpretable.

2. Raphael, too, had a false understanding of the Greeks. The history of culture is a series of productive distortions of works of art [eine Reihenfolge produktiver Entstellungen der Kunstwerke]. By which criteria can a performance of Toscanini’s be criticized? By the historical truth of Beethoven, which is itself no longer realizable.

3. It is politically practicable and legitimate not to permit the social restriction of a determinate artistic experiment. We must not demand that art be offered simultaneously with the material satisfaction of human beings. We must not say: “man does not live on bread alone, and therefore we demand art.” (See [Horkheimer’s] Thesis IV [& Adorno’s Thesis VII].)

4. To what extent does art have a content of its own? Is there any content for art outside of what is crudely natural? Art is something ‘spiritual.’ It says something—not about art, but rather about nature, about reality. If reality consists in suffering, in the satisfaction of the particular [Befreidigung des Partikularen], then Beethoven’s pathos is a protest against this suffering. Lacking any reference to the universality [Allgemeinheit] which does not yet prevail in this world, art becomes completely nonsensical. Art intends truth. It seeks to make something visible. As soon as, however, art is viewed without this relationship to reality, it acquires its ideological functions—that is, it becomes like religion: it wants to sell us on something. Art is not desired for its own sake. Art expresses the truth of the world, just as language does.

5. Counterthesis: Art has nothing whatsoever to do with truth. Art seeks to realize values. For example, art is meant to educate human beings. It should, however, not be misused as an instrument of the capitalist order.

   Counter-objection: If the concept of truth is to be reserved [aufgehoben] for science alone, then there is nothing more to say about it. But the task of “realizing values” makes art ideological. Art must be as universal [allgemein] as the truth.

6. Without a sense for art [Kunstsinn], one can’t even get the “pint of milk.”²² If you insist on the notion [Vorstellung] that you have to eat before you can enjoy art, then you’ve convinced yourself that the pint of milk can be procured without any regard for art, or even by the renunciation of art. The lack of art has abolished milk. [Der Mangel an Kunst hat die Milch abgeschafft.] Today, procuring this milk is an enormously complicated undertaking. It demands much more than economic knowledge [Wissen]; oddly enough, it demands a whole attitude [Haltung] which is co-determined in the relationship to other needs.

7. When I say that which I have to say about the world in the right attitude [richtigen Einstellung] and form [richtigen Form], then this is art. But with this I don’t satisfy any “sense for art” [Kunstsinn], nor do I do it because of a “need for art.” I want to bring the intention of a righted world [die Intention auf eine richtige Welt] into expression. Therefore, I want to formulate this intention precisely and rightly.

8. Today, art is not merely parasitic, but sells itself by utility [Nützlichkeit]. In this society, utility is its sole measure. The cultural moments which deny themselves this utility have the intention of transcending that which exists—not art as a traditional cultural commodity, but as that which terminates the social contract. Art which refuses praxis in earnestness may take on a transcendent aspect in the sense of the classless society. Isolation is no objection to art—to the contrary: today, art which is isolated is precisely that which is right.

9. It has been said that the actualization of the universal [die Verwirklichung des Allgemeinen] need not occur in the form of consciousness of the universal, but may even occur completely sealed off from the collective imagination [kollektiv Vorstellung]. Is the indication of the universal [der Hinweis auf das Allgemeine] as the truth of art actually the ultimate goal? Is this universality not rather the stigma of class society? Is there not something else to art, namely, that it expresses the possibility of thinking, intuition, and life which is no longer subject to the compulsion of the universal [Zwang des Allgemeinen] but is beyond this? In the thought of a higher value of art, is there not a moment of truth—that the classless society, in the actualization of the universal, is always accompanied by the emancipation from the universal [Emanzipation vom Allgemeinen], which is registered in the non-universality [Nichtallgemeinheit] of the work of art?

10. Conclusion: In the discussion of art, too, two opposing standpoints become apparent. The one: strictly monistic, and measures all according to a moral goal; the other: pluralistic, and applies both ethical and aesthetic measures of evaluation.

---

IV. Music and Milk

[Excerpts from the Discussion No. 4 (8/25/1942), by Gretel Adorno, Theodor Adorno, & Frederick Pollock]²³

Horkheimer: [...] You say that Nietzsche, Stirner, and Marx questioned the “ought” [das Sollen]; I would say that the entirety of bourgeois culture had already done this. It is grounded on the knowledge [Wissen] that no “ought” is given. That one “ought” or “should” is an auxiliary hypothesis one makes when they no longer believe. Sade and the whole enlightenment were of one mind on this. The bourgeoisie is the class which, fundamentally, believes nothing. Whenever ‘culture’ exists, cultural values [Kulturwerte] are not believed. One adorns their chambers with beautiful images for the sake of social prestige. With regard to the moral imperative [Moralgebot], Schopenhauer is right to say that if human beings were determined only by religion and morality, no one would even risk crossing the street anymore. As moral matters stand, things aren’t that far off. In the world of the bourgeoisie it becomes clear that the whole of culture arises only out of domination. Human beings know that society has an immanent tendency to culture, that society should not essentially be determined by domination. The idea of a classless society didn’t just happen to arise in Marx’s head, but is borne within every action oriented towards the establishment of a human society. All domination has bad conscience—i.e., rulers have always had to whisper when speaking to one another. They always had to convince others that, without ideologized commandments [ideologisierten Gebote], nothing could work out. In everything we call art or poetry resides an intimation [Ahnung] of the state in which there is no domination. This moment cannot be left out of debates over culture. That one is compelled to give the masses something like culture—this indicates utopia still lives in the hearts of the masses. Culture is a bow to what is good in human beings. To summarize: (1) bourgeois society is characterized by nonbelief [Nicht-Glauben] in morals, beauty, etc. (2) that culture has always been needed makes it evident that the masses themselves have an intimation of the right, classless society. Whatever I find to be affirmative in it relates to classless society; the rest falls to pieces in one’s hand as a lie. […] Our forefathers did what was right not out of respect for what “ought” to be done or “should” be done, but because they thought it would be better if all were to do the same. Excepting the Kantians, no one has ever believed in the “ought” or “should.” The demand human beings be offered ‘cultural values’ is always, and unambiguously, ideological. The primary needs of human beings do not lie in this direction. It is difficult to say what [culture] would be like in socialist society. Today, in any case, gramophone records are essentially there to make the idea of socialist society seem outmoded in comparison. Why should we define something as a [cultural] value when we know very well it only exists today to prevent the realization of a classless society? Needs such as those for milk must be satisfied. But in a situation like ours today, in which so many human beings are perishing, other needs cannot be equated with the need for milk. [...] In the same instant in which so many human beings starve, in which the world is in danger of transforming into one vast machine of terror, one cannot speak of the [cultural] value of gramophone records. [...] Culture today is the critique of culture.²⁴

Adorno: There is something false in the concept of salvaging [Hinüberrettens] [cultural values,] as if in a classless society there would be watchmen to decide whether Bach is to be salvaged and Schumann is to be disposed of. The concept of salvaging contains the notion of some authority, some selection mechanism, which will, in fact, be alien to classless society. So long as the question is: more milk, or less milk and gramophone records, one must decide in favor of milk.²⁵

---

Appendix 1: Excerpts from the “Discussion” of Pollock’s “Presentation” on the ‘Theory of Needs’ (6/30/1942)

[translated by Rodney Livingstone for New Left Review (Mar/Apr 2021)]

Note: In the “Discussion” of Pollock’s “Presentation” on the ‘Theory of Needs’ (6/30/1942), both Horkheimer and Adorno criticize Pollocks’ thought experiment which entertains the idea that it is “possible to conceive of a [state] capitalist society in which there is no involuntary unemployment and the living standards of the masses are on the rise—say, with Wallace’s ‘pint of milk a day’ for every child.”²⁶ Against Pollock’s hypothetical gesture of assuming the end of economic crises in this new form of capitalism,²⁷ Adorno and Horkheimer object on the grounds that Pollock has given economy too narrow a scope, as Horkheimer formulates critical theory’s critique of ‘economic reductionism’ in the “Postscript” [1937] to “Traditional and Critical Theory.”²⁸ Against Pollock, both Adorno and Horkheimer argue that the contradiction between the forces and relations of production will persist even if they (begrudgingly) agree to play along with Pollock’s thought experiment: Adorno presents the problem structurally, as the logic of the process of capital accumulation itself, while Horkheimer presents the problem phenomenologically, as the experience of hunger amid unprecedented capacity for producing social wealth. In this, they follow Marx’s comments on the general law of capitalist accumulation and the creation of the reserve army of labor in Capital Vol. 1, which is perhaps the most important passage for their concept of crisis in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947)—

In the form of machines, however, alienated reason is moving toward a society which reconciles thought, in its solidification as an apparatus both material and intellectual, with a liberated living element, and relates it to society itself as its true subject. The particularist origin and the universal perspective of thought have always been inseparable. Today, with the transformation of the world into industry, the perspective of the universal, the social realization of thought, is so fully open to view that thought is repudiated by the rulers themselves as mere ideology. It is a telltale manifestation of the bad conscience of the cliques in whom economic necessity is finally embodied that its revelations, from the “intuitions” of the Führer to the “dynamic worldview,” no longer acknowledge their own atrocities as necessary consequences of logical regularities, in resolute contrast to earlier bourgeois apologetics. The mythological lies about “mission” and “fate” which they use instead do not even express a complete untruth: it is no longer the objective laws of the market which govern the actions of industrialists and drive humanity toward catastrophe. Rather, the conscious decisions of the company chairmen execute capitalism’s old law of value, and thus its fate, as resultants no less compulsive than the blindest price mechanisms. The rulers themselves do not believe in objective necessity, even if they sometimes call their machinations by that name. They posture as engineers of world history. Only their subjects accept the existing development, which renders them a degree more powerless with each prescribed increase in their standard of living, as inviolably necessary. Now that the livelihood of those still needed to operate the machines can be provided with a minimal part of the working time which the masters of society have at their disposal, the superfluous remainder, the overwhelming mass of the population, are trained as additional guards of the system, so that they can be used today and tomorrow as material for its grand designs. They are kept alive as an army of unemployed. Their reduction to mere objects of administration, which preforms every department of modern life right down to language and perception, conjures up an illusion of objective necessity before which they believe themselves powerless. Poverty as the antithesis between power and impotence is growing beyond measure, together with the capacity permanently to abolish poverty. From the commanding heights of the economy to the latest professional rackets, the tangled mass of cliques and institutions which ensures the indefinite continuation of the status quo is impenetrable to each individual. Even for a union boss, to say nothing of a manager, a proletarian is no more than a superfluous specimen, should he catch his notice at all, while the union boss in turn must live in terror of his own liquidation.²⁹

—specifically, the following passage, which both Adorno (in Thesis II) and Horkheimer (in Thesis VI) refer to in their respective “Theses” on need:

We saw in Part IV, when analysing the production of relative surplus-value, that within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productivity of labour are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker; that all means for the development of production undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become means of domination and exploitation of the producers; they distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, they destroy the actual content of his labour by turning it into a torment; they alienate (entfremden) from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they deform the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation, and every extension of accumulation becomes, conversely, a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. Finally, the law which always holds the relative surplus population or industrial reserve army in equilibrium with the extent and energy of accumulation rivets the worker to capital more firmly than the wedges of Hephaestus held Prometheus to the rock. It makes an accumulation of misery a necessary condition, corresponding to the accumulation of wealth. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital.³⁰

Marx himself makes the connection between the contradiction of the forces and relations of production and the general law of capitalist accumulation in a footnote, quoting from his own Poverty of Philosophy (1847), by way of explaining “the antagonistic character of capitalist accumulation” as an historical experience of capitalist ‘progress’:

From day to day it thus becomes clearer that the relations of production in which the bourgeoisie moves do not have a simple, uniform character but rather a dual one; that in the same relations in which wealth is produced, poverty is produced also; that in the same relations in which there is a development of the forces of production, there is also the development of a repressive force; that these relations produce bourgeois wealth, ie. the wealth of the bourgeois class, only by continually annihilating the wealth of the individual members of this class and by producing an ever-growing proletariat.³¹

---

[Excerpts from the “Discussion” of Pollock’s “Presentation” (6/30/1942)]

Adorno: Asks whether disproportionality [viz., one of the core concepts of Pollock’s ‘Presentation’: “disruptions to the manifold conditions that produce the equilibrium needed to bring about the expansion of production, while fully exploiting all the available ‘factors of production’”] really is the ultimate explanation for the crises of capitalism. Don’t the true causes lie rather in the nature of the accumulation process itself? They will not be eliminated by these ‘remedies’. (…) This new form of society will also still contain the conflict between property relations and the forces of production, a vast majority of producers and a minority of property owners—with all the resulting opportunities for crises. (…) The nature of economic forces is such that their application represents human satisfaction. On the other hand, this society succeeds in satisfying people’s needs only by making a detour via owners and a bureaucracy whose survival is tied to profits. The rulers then have to make concessions to the oppressed, whose continued exploitation jeopardizes the entire system, and these faux frais must necessarily generate new difficulties. (…) Human needs are not natural but historical, the products of class rule. We would have to criticize these needs as measured against the stage reached by the forces of production. One would have to show that the masses have false needs, but that objective, ‘right’ needs do exist. It must be possible to clarify these concepts of genuine and false needs historically. The critique of ideology and false culture must be extended to the ‘needs’ of mass culture—the question of the materialist meaning of culture, as opposed to the culture that has mass society in its grip.³²

Horkheimer explains both where he sees the starting point for conflict in such a society and also the task for theory. If the society of the future is to function there will have to be commands and acts of terror, whether a lot or a little. We should drop the idea, which does not come from Marx but constantly recurs in Marxism, that a future society would emerge automatically and that the masses would decide in its favour without anyone intervening. Moreover, it is not clear how this theory has taken hold. A future society must contain actual, individual people who call society [viz., state capitalist society] what it is, namely a class society in which acts of terror and injustice occur, and infinitely less is achieved than should be possible, given the state of development of the forces of production. If the mass of humanity were actually to be generously rewarded, the rulers would have no interest in it. The task of theory in the future will be to highlight the contradictions and rouse protests. To insist that paradise can be realized on the basis of the technical forces of production. […] In Pollock’s case the new society appears to be static. Hitherto, however, there has always been hunger; the masses have lived in the most inhuman conditions. If we agree to go along with this thought-experiment, we shall see right away that in this Brave New World smaller differences will result in the same horror that was formerly produced by hunger. And the question of timing will also be crucial—how quickly will the masses obtain how much, and so on. We must insist from the very outset that the ‘pint of milk’ should be distributed to everyone right away. I admit that over the coming decades, when the experiment will be taking place, this criticism is unlikely to be supported by the masses. But nor is it clear that theory can do without class, whether it is supported by a few or has the masses behind it. The dynamics of history are not going to stop with fascism.³³

---

Note: “Classless Society”—the criterion of early critical theory.

[A] credo is the last thing my communism resorts to; ... even at the cost of its orthodoxy—my communism is absolutely nothing other than the expression of certain experiences I have undergone in my thinking and in my life; ... it is a drastic, not infertile expression of the fact that the present intellectual industry finds it impossible to make room for my thinking, just as the present economic order finds it impossible to accommodate my life. —[M]y communism represents the obvious, reasoned attempt on the part of a man who is completely or almost completely deprived of any means of production to proclaim his right to them, both in his thinking and in his life.

— Walter Benjamin, Letter to Gershom Scholem (May, 1934)³⁴

You admit that for the time being you do not want to accept communism ‘as the solution for humanity’. But of course the issue is precisely to abolish the unproductive pretensions of solutions for humanity by means of the feasible findings of this very system; indeed, to give up entirely the immodest prospect of ‘total’ systems and at least to make the attempt to construct the days of humanity in just as loose a fashion as a rational person who has had a good night’s sleep begins his day.

— Walter Benjamin, Letter to Werner Kraft (1934)³⁵

Concept of Reason. Classless society in the critical sense.

— Adorno and Horkheimer (1939)³⁶

The orienting idea of early critical theory—its theoretical and practical horizon, its criterion of judgment—is the idea of classless society. However, this idea rarely appears so explicitly in their published texts of the 30s and 40s. In their unpublished texts of the time, however, the idea of classless society is omnipresent, and so is their conviction that, if presented carefully enough, could even seem self-evidently true to their readers. This enables us to read Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) differently, for instance, since the ‘imaginary witness’ they speak of at the end of the book is the recipient of their open secret—the book is littered with phrases like “all people know,” whether “in their innermost awareness” or in “dim knowledge.”³⁷ In the conclusion to “The Schema of Mass Culture,” which was originally intended to be the concluding supplement to the ‘Culture Industry’ chapter, Adorno writes:

The neon signs which hang over our cities and outshine the natural light of the night with their own are comets presaging the natural disaster of society, its frozen death. Yet they do not come from the sky. They are controlled from the earth. It depends upon human beings themselves whether they will extinguish these lights and awake from a nightmare which only threatens to become actual as long as men believe in it.³⁸

Each of the core chapters of the Dialectic of Enlightenment ends with an image of waking up from a dream, returning to consciousness, of coming into possession of one’s powers.³⁹ Since 1848, at the latest, a new horizon of enlightenment had been marked, which, once opened, could be thought by anyone: “the struggle for a society without classes (...) has been on the historical agenda since the middle of the nineteenth century.”⁴⁰ Though they were heterodox Marxists, for Marxian reasons,⁴¹ they were communists first. In the ISR’s 1942 Seminars on Need, from which Adorno’s famous theses on need originate, Horkheimer explains: “The idea of a classless society didn’t just happen to arise in Marx’s head, but is borne within every action oriented towards the establishment of a human society. (...) That [domination] is compelled to give the masses something like culture—this indicates utopia still lives in their hearts. (...) [T]hat culture has always been needed makes it evident that the masses themselves have an intimation of the right, classless society.”⁴² The idea of classless society is not an a priori, either a necessary and apodictic or an arbitrary and heuristic one, but the reflective form given to demands we already make in this world for another. Take, for instance, the difference between a collector’s need for gramophone records and a hungry child’s need for milk: “In the same instant in which so many human beings starve, in which the world is in danger of transforming into one vast machine of terror, one cannot speak of the [cultural] value of gramophone records.”⁴³ What is different about the need of the hungry child, Horkheimer writes in his theses on the problem of need, is that it contains the demand for a society so transformed that no one is forced to make a dichotomy between music and milk, so-called ideal and so-called material needs.⁴⁴ (Thesis II: “The social order is as much a part of the milk as its fat content.”) Adorno affirms in reply: “So long as the question is: more milk, or less milk and more gramophone records, one must decide in favor of milk.”⁴⁵ The most famous formulation of this thought is found in Adorno’s Minima Moralia: “There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry any more.”⁴⁶ At its best, Horkheimer concludes, culture therefore expresses an indictment of the conditions under which culture has been offered to the exclusion of milk: “Whatever I find to be affirmative in [culture] relates to classless society; the rest falls to pieces in one’s hand as a lie.”⁴⁷ This is a singular demonstration of the method of early critical theory, which, at one point, they call “reverse induction”:

Social concepts derive their critical coloring from the fact that the rift between value and reality is typical of the totality of modern culture. This leads to the hypothesis that society is a "system" in the material sense that every single social field or relation contains and reflects, in various ways, the whole itself. Consequently, an intensive analysis of a single relation or institution that is particularly representative of the prevailing pattern of reality may be far better able to develop and grasp the nature of the pattern than would an extensive compilation and description of assorted facts. The “pervasive” character of our society, the fact that it makes its peculiar relations felt in every nook and cranny of the social whole, calls for a methodologic conception that will take account of this fact. Categories have to be formed through a process of induction that is the reverse of the traditional inductive method which verified its hypotheses by collecting individual experiences until they attained the weight of universal laws. Induction in social theory, per contra, should seek the universal within the particular, not above or beyond it, and, instead of moving from one particular to another and then to the heights of abstraction, should delve deeper and deeper into the particular and discover the universal law therein.⁴⁸

In this case, the question of method is how we might hear a weakened child’s cry for milk over the roar of gramophone music, and, in the silence of our shame before that cry, the unperformed songs of an unstarved society.⁴⁹ Theoretical reflection on the implications of the demand that a hungry child not go without milk simultaneously articulates a comprehensive judgment of the existing world and a determinate indication towards a better one. As Horkheimer concludes the third of his “Theses on Need”: The effort to fulfill even the most basic needs is largely illusory if it is linked to the maintenance of conditions of catastrophe and the need to end these catastrophes is no more secondary, tertiary, more refined, more ‘spiritual’ than any of the most coarsest natural necessities.⁵⁰ Because our concepts are forms which reflect unsatisfied needs and uncultivated powers, they are necessarily as self-indicting as culture is under class domination. Consciousness of this, when integrated as a moment of our concepts themselves, gives our concepts a critical edge.

1. New Left Review 128 (Mar/Apr 2021), 71-82. [link]

(Send me an email if you want a PDF, apparently I still have an active NLR subscription.)

2. For the discussion, see Constellations Volume 8, No 1, (2001), 130-135. [link] For Winkler and Wolin’s Introduction, see: Ibid., 127-129. [link]

3. Horkheimer, “Zum Problem der Bedürfnisse,” [1942]. In: MHGS BD 12 (1985), 252-256. Author’s translation.

4. “Madelung”: [MHGS Bd. 12 ed. fn.:] Aage Madelung, author of the utopian novel Zirkus Mensch (1918) among others.

5. “the demand for a pint of milk”: [MHGS Bd. 12 ed. fn.:] The demand that every child should receive a pint (~1/2 Liter) of milk per day was part of the international food program of the New Deal. The demand was raised by the left wing of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s government, particularly by the Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace.

6. “[and terroristic]”: [MHGS Bd. 12 ed. fn.:] Found in Horkheimer’s typescript, but not Pollock’s revision.

7. “the configuration of human community”: [die Gestaltung menschlicher Gemeinschaft]

8. [Fn. from Shuster & Macdonald’s translation of Adorno’s ‘Theses on Need’]: See Marx, Capital: Volume 1, trans. B. Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, in association with New Left Review, 1976), 799; Marx and Engels, Werke (Berlin: Dietz-Verlag, 1956), 23:674.

9. See fn. 14.

10. [Fn. from Shuster & Macdonald’s translation of Adorno’s ‘Theses on Need’]: See Theodor W. Adorno, “‘Static’ and ‘Dynamic’ as Sociological Categories,” trans. H. Kaal, Diogenes, 33, Spring 1961, 28-49; GS, 8:217-237. [Translators’ note.]

11. Discussion: “[2. Zu einem Referat über das Verhältnis von Bedürfnis und Kultur bei Aldous Huxley] (28. Juli 1942).” In: MHGS, Bd. 12 (1985), 571-575. Author’s translation.

12. “productive imagination”: [“produktiven Einbildungskraft”]

13. Cf. Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820/21), §§189-208.

14. In: MHGS, Bd. 12 (1985), 571.

15. Discussion: “[3. Zu Max Horkheimer’s ‘Zum Problem der Bedürfnisse’ und Theodor W. Adorno’s ‘Thesen über Bedürfnis’] (11. August 1942).” In: Ibid., 575-579. Author’s translation.

16. See: Estelle Morgan. “Bourgeois and Philistine.” The Modern Language Review 57, no. 1 (1962): 69–72. https://doi.org/10.2307/3721977.

17. English in original.

18. “Strength Through Joy”: “Kraft Durch Freude,” a government agency in Nazi Germany which subsidized leisure-activities in the effort to create a Volksgemeinschaft.

19. “Wesensschau”: In Husserl, an intuition directed toward eidos or essences. See: Dagfinn Føllesdal’s “Husserl’s Reductions and the Role They Play in His Phenomenology.” In: A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism. Edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (Blackwell, 2006), 109. [link]

20. “preservationist culture, as represented by… Toscanini”: [MHGS Bd. 12 ed. fn.:] See Adorno’s critique in “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” ZfS vol. 7, no. 3 (1938), 321-356. [link]

21. “Reinhardt’s Shakespeare Productions”: Max Reinhardt (1873-1943), expressionist avant-garde theater director known, in part, for his Shakespeare stage productions in interwar Austria and Germany. In exile after 1933, he co-produced and -directed a Hollywood production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) with William Dieterle. On Reinhardt’s method of interpreting literature of the past for the present, see: Kahane, Henry. “Max Reinhardt’s Total Theatre: A Centenary Lecture.” Comparative Literature Studies 12, no. 3 (1975): 323–37. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40246139.

22. English in original.

23. Discussion: “[4. On Günther Anders’ “Theses on ‘Need,’ ‘Culture,’ ‘Cultural needs,’ ‘Cultural values,’ ‘Values’”] (August 25th, 1942).” In: MHGS Bd. 12 (1985), 579-586. Author’s translation.

24. Horkheimer, In: Ibid., 583-586. Author’s translation.

25. Adorno, In: Ibid., 585. Author’s translation.

26. In: “Theory of Needs,” “Discussion” of Pollock’s Presentation (6/30/1942), translated by Rodney Livingstone. NLR 128 (Mar/Apr 2021), 73.

27. Pollock: “Assuming that the means of production and the labour force for full employment and for a rising standard of living already exist, and could easily be multiplied, the economic side of the problem can be reduced to the question of whether there are now more levers available with which to overcome periodic crises than existed in the nineteenth century.” In: Ibid. Emphasis in original.

28. Horkheimer [1937]: “The economy is the first cause of wretchedness, and critique, theoretical and practical, must address itself primarily to it. It would be mechanistic, not dialectical thinking, however, to judge the future forms of society solely according to their economy. Historical change does not leave untouched the relations between the spheres of culture, and if in the present state of society economy is the master of man and therefore the lever by which he is to be moved to change, in the future men must themselves determine all their relationships in the face of natural necessities. Economics in isolation will therefore not provide the norm by which the community of[human beings] is to be measured. (…) Economism, to which the critical theory is often reduced, does not consist in giving too much importance to the economy, but in giving it too narrow a scope. The theory is concerned with society as a whole, but this broad scope is forgotten in economism where limited phenomena are made the final court of appeal. (…) The critique of economism, however, consists not in turning away from economic analysis but in engaging in it more fully and along the lines indicated by history. (…) [C]ritical theory has the dialectical function of measuring every historical stage in the light not only of isolated data and concepts but of its primary and total content, and of being concerned that this content be vitally operative. The right philosophy today does not take the form of withdrawing from concrete economic and social analyses in order to work on empty minutiae which are related to nothing and are calculated to hide reality at every point. The critical theory has never been reducible to specialized economic science. The dependence of politics on the economy has been its object, not its program.” In: “Postscript” [to “Traditional and Critical Theory”] [1937], Critical Theory: Selected Essays, Max Horkheimer. Translated by Matthew J. O’Connell and others (Continuum, 2002), 249-251. Translation modified.

29. In: Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Translated by Edmund Jephcott (SUP, 2002), 29-30.

30. Marx, “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation.” In: Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One. Introduced by Ernest Mande, Translated by Ben Fowkes. (Penguin Books / New Left Review, 1982), 798-799.

31. In: Ibid., 799. Footnote No. 23.

32. In: “Theory of Needs,” “Discussion” of Pollock’s Presentation (6/30/1942), translated by Rodney Livingstone. NLR 128 (Mar/Apr 2021), 76-77.

33. In: Ibid., 77-78.

34. Quoted in: Alison Ross, (2021). Walter Benjamin’s communism. Thesis Eleven, 166(1), 17. https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136211044183.

35. Quoted in: Ibid., 28.

36. In: “[5. Aspekte der politischen Theorie. Entwurf des ‘Manifests’ (I)] (25. Oktober 1939),” Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 12. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag 1985), 512.

37. Adorno and Horkheimer, “Propaganda”: “Propaganda directed at changing the world—what an absurdity! Propaganda turns language into an instrument, a lever, a machine. Propaganda fixes the composition which human beings have taken on under social injustice, by stirring them. It counts on their ability to be counted on. All people know in their innermost awareness that through this medium they are turned into media, as in a factory. The rage they feel in following it is the old rage against the yoke, reinforced by the dim knowledge that the way out pointed by propaganda is the wrong one. Propaganda manipulates human beings; when it screams freedom it con­tradicts itself. Mendacity is inseparable from it. It is the community of lies in which the leader and the led come together, even when its content as such is correct. In it even truth becomes a mere means, to the end of gain­ing adherents; it falsifies truth simply by taking it into its mouth. That is why true resistance is without propaganda. Propaganda is anti-human. It presupposes that the principle that politics should spring from communal insight is no more than a form of words. Even propaganda for freedom can be a source of confusion in that it necessarily effaces the difference between theory and the particular interests of its addressees. The workers’ leaders murdered in Germany were cheated even of the truth of their own action, since fascism belied their solidarity by the selectivity of its revenge. When intellectuals are tortured to death in concentration camps, that does not necessarily make the workers outside worse off. Fascism was not the same for Ossietzky and for the proletariat. Propa­ganda cheated both. What is suspect is not, of course, the depiction of reality as hell but the routine invitation to break out of it. If that invitation can be addressed to anyone today, it is neither to the so-called masses nor to the individual, who is powerless, but rather to an imaginary witness, to whom we be­queath it so that it is not entirely lost with us.” In: Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002 [1987]), 212-213. Cf. The conclusion of the end of Thesis VII of ‘Elements of Anti-Semitism’: “The ideology of race and the reality of class both equally reveal only an abstract difference from the majority. But although the progressive ticket tends to produce something worse than its content, the content of the fascist ticket is so vacuous that it can be maintained as a substitute for something better only by desperate efforts on the part of the deceived. Its horror is that of the blatant but insistent lie. While it admits no truth by which it might be measured, its absurdity is so mon­strous as to bring truth negatively within reach, so that it can be kept apart from those deprived of judgment only by their total abstention from thought. Enlightenment itself, having mastered itself and assumed its own power, could break through the limits of enlightenment.” In: Ibid., 172

38. Adorno, Theodor, “The Schema of Mass Culture,” in Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays in Mass Culture, edited by J.M. Bernstein. (London: Routledge, 1991), 83.

39. In: “Language, Mythology, and Enlightenment: Historical Notes on Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment.” Social Research Vol. 65, No. 4 (Winter 1998), 835.

40. Horkheimer, “Montaigne and the Function of Skepticism” [1938]. In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 302-303.

41. Adorno (1939): “Everyone says that Marxism is done for. To this we say, no, it is not done for, but rather, that one must remain loyal to it. But if one is actually loyal to it, then this can only mean driving the movement of the dialectical process further.” In: MHGS, Bd. 12 (1985), 524. Author’s translation.

42. Horkheimer, In: MHGS BD. 12 (1985), 583-584. Author’s translation.

43. Horkheimer, Ibid., 584-586. Author’s translation.

44. Horkheimer, In: Ibid., 252-253. Author’s translation.

45. Adorno, In: Ibid., 585. Author’s translation.

46. Adorno, In: “§100. Sur l’Eau.” Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life [1952], translated by E.F.N. Jephcott (Verso, 2005), 156.

47. Horkheimer, In: MHGS BD. 12 (1985), 584.

48. Max Horkheimer, “Notes on Institute Activities”. In: SPSS vol. 9, no. 1 (1941), 121—123.

49. See the author’s translation of Adorno and Horkheimer’s discussion: “The Temporal Core of Truth [Zeitkern der Wahrheit]. Experience and Utopia in Dialectical Theory. (10/18/1939)” [link]

50. Horkheimer, In: MHGS BD 12 (1985), 252-256.