World Spirit as Baal: Marx, Adorno, and Dostoyevsky on Alienation

In a passage from The German Ideology, Marx writes that “as long . . . as activity is naturally, not voluntarily, divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him.”¹ This is a fairly typical expression of Marx’s conception of alienated labor. Marx gives special attention to various forms of alienation: in the form of money, of religion, of wages, and so on. He is at his most philosophical when he analyzes these forms of alienation, not as discrete facts about capitalist society but as so many expressions of alienated labor. Alienation is fundamentally alienated labor: that is, productive activity. To be human is to produce one’s own life, which, once produced, becomes both the means and the object of further production. Where Hegel speaks of the work of the concept, Marx appeals to the primacy of the labor of historical individuals—even though he cannot appeal to any state of nature in which history was purely and equally produced by the individual. For, at every known stage of history, productive activity was not carried out equally. Some class has always been responsible for producing for the sake of another class and at the direction of another class. Hence the activity of the subservient class is not activity that expresses its life. Since productive activity is essentially expressive of one’s own life, the labor of this class is self-contradictory activity. One’s own activity becomes an “alien power,” as the passage above puts it. This confrontation with one’s own activity is what defines alienation, for Marx: alienation as alienated labor.

This is all familiar territory. My interest is in how this concept of alienation fares in late capitalism. More specifically, I am interested in how Frankfurt theorist Theodor Adorno approaches this concept. The first generation of the Frankfurt school was plagued by the primacy that Marx assigns to the concept of labor. In a time of totalitarian regimes and global industrial and military conflict, alienation seems somehow more ubiquitous than even Marx had described. Many of the early Frankfurt theorists (e.g., Franz Neumann) argued that Marx’s concept of alienated labor had run its course: that is, that “alienated labor” was a concept contingent on a specific historical period, which capitalism had left behind. Others, and Adorno in particular, saw late capitalism as an opportunity to rethink the concept of alienated labor without seeing it as a relic of industrial capitalism. If the motif of “alienated labor” appears irrelevant now, it might be because the concept had been ideological from the very start, even in Marx’s own writings.

I will say more about this history. In tracing out Adorno’s thinking on alienated labor, I want to argue for two claims: (1) “Alienated labor” is not a prediction that was falsified in late capitalism but, rather, a phrase that undermined Marx’s materialism from the very start; and (2) an Adornian materialist reading of alienation discloses its ubiquity in late capitalism, as what Adorno terms “universal guilt” instead of as alienated labor. After discussing Adorno’s critique of the concept of alienated labor (part I), I will show how Adorno draws on themes in Hegel and Dostoyevsky to reconceive alienation (part II) and retrieve something of Marx’s materialism (part III).

I. Alienated Labor

I began by showing how Marx unifies the various concrete forms of alienation by appeal to his concept of labor. Because labor is primary in the production of history, alienation is primarily alienated labor. The primacy assigned to labor emerges in the Paris Manuscripts, where Marx writes of “species being”: “It is just in the working-up of the objective world . . . that man first proves himself to be a species being. . . . Through and because of this production, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labor is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he contemplates himself in a world...