Real Abstraction

On Capital as Real Abstraction Werner Bonefeld Introducing Real Abstraction Marx’s critique of political economy recognises that in capitalist society Man is not the subject of her own social world. Rather she is a personification of objectively unfolding economic forces that impose themselves on the acting individuals seemingly according to their own innate laws and by their own volition. Their movement enriches the owners of the means of life and is crisis-ridden, with often devastating effect on especially the direct producers of social wealth. At the blink of an eye, suddenly and without warning, amidst an accumulation of great social wealth and after prolonged struggles for better conditions, the economic forces tend to cut them off from access to the means of subsidence and then society ‘suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence’ (Marx and Engels 1997: 18). In distinction to traditional Marxist accounts associated with dialectical materialism, the economic laws of development are not laws of some abstractly understood transhistorical economic nature that unfolds through history and which manifests itself in the historically specific modalities of concrete social relations. In distinction to this view, the circumstance that Man has to eat and therefore exchange with nature does not explain capitalism nor does capitalism derive from it. Man does not eat in the abstract. Critically understood historical materialism is critique of capitalist society understood dogmatically as natural. That is to say, the economic laws of development are entirely determined by the social relations of production. What appears in the appearance of society as a relationship between economic things is not some abstractly conceived nature. Rather, what appears in society as economic objectivity is Men in her social relations. That is, the so-called economic laws of development express the social nature of a definite form of social relations. On the points raised here, see Gunn (1992), Murray (2016), Postone (1993), and Bonefeld (2014). On social nature, see Schmidt (1971). The question of ‘capital’ thus becomes a question about the social relationship between persons expressed as a relationship between economic things, that is, real economic abstractions. In capitalism, Man is ruled by economic abstractions over which she has no control. The economic categories manifest social compulsion by real abstractions as natural necessity. Their natural force articulates the innate necessity of the capitalistically organised metabolism with nature. Marx’s critique of ‘the’ economists has therefore to do with the simple fact that they treat economic matter in distinction from society, transforming the social nature of the capitalist social relations into pretended laws of nature. Economics is the science of incomprehensible economic matter. Economics deals with economic quantities without being able to tell us what they are. For the sake of establishing itself as a science of economy matter, it seeks to make economic things intelligible. For this reason it rejects the inclusion of the human social relations into economic argument as a metaphysical distraction. Economics is however quite unable to establish itself as social science in distinction to society. As Joan Robinson put it in exasperation about the seeming inability of economics to establish itself as a science of economic matter: ’K is capital, ∆K is investment. Then what is K? Why, capital of course. It must mean something, so let us get on with the analysis, and do not bother about these officious prigs who ask us to say what it means’ (1962, p. 68). On the difficulty of economics to establish itself as a discipline without subject matter, see Bonefeld (2014 chap. 2). The term real abstraction articulates the vanishing appearance of Man as embodiment of the ghost-walking economic categories. On ghost-walking, see Marx (1966, chap. 48). In the literature, the ‘properties’ of real abstractions are sometimes referred to as ‘value abstraction’, ‘commodity abstraction’, ‘exchange abstraction’, and also as economic abstraction. Marx says that the ‘individuals are now ruled by abstractions’ (Marx 1973: 164). He also refers to ‘actual abstraction’ in the context of value as an actual abstraction from concrete labour, for which he uses the term ‘abstract labour’, which a temporal category of necessary social labour. On abstract labour, see Bonefeld (2010). The contemporary use of the term real abstraction in the critique of political economy goes back to Sohn-Rethel (1971). He conceives of it as an abstraction from the use-value of the commodity, from its material quality. It manifests the commodity in purely quantitative terms. For him real abstraction asserts itself in exchange. The category ‘real abstraction’ has thus to do with the value-validity of the private appropriation of social labour. Value-validity manifests itself in exchange. It presents itself in the form of money, expresses itself in a certain quantity of money, and manifests value-validity in abstraction from its concrete character. One hundred pound of this is the same as a hundred pounds of that. That is, in capitalism wealth, that is valorised value, presents itself without an atom of utility. That is, ‘there is no difference or distinction in things of equal value. One hundred pounds worth of lead or iron, is of as great a value as one hundred pounds worth of silver or gold.’ The one is the ‘same as any other’ (Marx 1990: 127–8, 129). The act of an equivalent exchange therefore ‘implies the reduction of the products to be exchanged to their equivalents, to something abstract, but by no means – as traditional discussion would maintain – to something material’ (Adorno 1976: 80). The foundation of value equivalence cannot be found in ‘the geometrical, physical, chemical or other natural property of commodities. Such properties come into considerations only to the extent that they make the commodities useful, i.e. turn them into use values’ (Marx 1990: 139). According to Marx, value is the product of abstract labour – of labour in the abstract. Value equivalence expresses therefore something invisible that is neither divine nor natural in character. Something invisible ‘holds sway in reality [Sache] itself’ (Adorno 1976: 80) and presents itself, however sweepingly, in the money form, in which the exchange value of a commodity appears as a definite amount of money. Real abstraction crystallises in money and it is through money that the social bond of capitalist social reproduction is established. Commodities that cannot be exchanged for money are useless regardless of their concrete properties and the individual human needs that they could satisfy. What counts is value that expresses itself in the form of money, which is always also of money as more money. Labour expended in production is valid as value producing labour only on the condition that it achieves value-validity in exchange, in which a concrete utility of the commodity is reduced to a pure quantity, expressed in money. On Sohn-Rethel conception of real abstraction, see Engster and Schlaudt (2018). Exploration of Sohn-Rethel’s ‘real abstraction’ has by and large been confined to Adorno inspired accounts of the critique of political economy as a critical social theory. Indeed, one could argue that Adorno’s Negative Dialectic is a far-reaching critique of society as real abstraction (Bonefeld 2016a). After Adorno, the New Reading of Marx expounded ‘real abstraction’ into arguments about the dialectic of the value form (Backhaus 1997), exchange validity (Reichelt 2005), and conceptions of critique as ‘form-genetic explanations’ (Reichelt 1995; 2001; Backhaus 1992), which aim at uncovering the thing-like social relations as inverted forms of definite social relations. The ghost-walking economic categories, which Marx expounds as ‘value in process, money in process and as such capital’ (Marx 1990: 256), are the categories of a social practice of real abstraction (see Arthur 2004; Backhaus 2005; Reichelt 2007). According to Sohn-Rethel (1978: 13) form-genetic explanation amounts to an anamnesis of the social origin, or genesis, of real economic abstraction. The German original says ‘Historischer Materialismus ist Anamnesis der Genese.’ Negative dialectic as critique of political economy is the dialectic of the manner in which definite social relations vanish in their own social world only to reappear as, say, relations of price competitiveness. ‘Exchange principle and coldness’ (Adorno 2003: 35) are one and the same phenomenon of real abstraction. Real abstraction is the society as the (value-)thing (cf. Lotz 2014: 114). Real Abstraction and Objective Illusion: On Social Form The natural character of capitalist society is both an actuality and a necessary illusion. The illusion signifies that within this society, economic laws assert themselves as natural processes that govern society as if by their own independent logic and volition. Traditional social theory conceives of government by (economic) things as system logic. Traditional social theory divides society into system-logic and social action and considers this divide as a dialectic of structure and struggle or structure and agency, which is the premise of hegemonic social theory (see Bonefeld, 1993; 2016b). Economics conceives of it as a relationship between spontaneous market structure and rational individual behaviour. In this argument, then, the definite character of the social relations of production establishes itself behind the backs of the acting subjects, who are compelled to accommodate to systemic demand. In distinction, Habermas’ social theory accords to acting subjects the power to prevent the total colonisation of their life-world by the forces of the system, keeping a space for non-instrumental properties, such as empathy and human warmth. On Habermas as a traditional thinker of system-logic and social action, see Reichelt (2000) and Henning (2018). However real, their independent assertion is nevertheless an illusion because its validity arises from a definite mode of social reproduction. That is, Man is ‘governed by the product of his own hands’ (Marx 1990: 772) and it is his own social product that acts with the force of an elemental natural process. Indeed the capitalist social relations assume the form a relationship between things, and that is, Man vanishes in her own social world only to reappear with a price tag. What appears in the appearance of society as an autonomic subject of valorization, of value as surplus value, of money as more money? What appears is not some economic nature. Rather, what appears is Man in her social relations as personification of an economic world that is governed by the movements of coins, beyond social control. Marx’s critique of political economy thinks against the spell of the dazzling economic forms. It wants to get behind their secrets, to demystify their fateful appearance as forces of nature. His critique does therefore not think about economic things. Rather, it thinks out of them to uncover their social foundation. Marx’s Capital is not an economic text. Economics is the formula of an inverted world of ‘silent economic compulsion’, of society under economic duress. The circumstance that every individual reacts ‘under the compulsion’ of economic forces begs the question of their origin and the manner in which they render individuals ‘mere character masks, agents of exchange in a supposedly separate economic order’ (Adorno 1990: 311). This stance raises the question about the meaning of critique in the critique of political economy. What is criticised? Marx saw his work as a ‘critique of the entire system of economic categories’ (Marx 1976: 254). Emphasis added, and translation altered, based on the German original. Rather than arguing from the standpoint of some abstractly conceived materiality of labour, and connected arguments about how to regulate it in favour of this or that social interest, society in the form of real economic abstractions has to be understood from within its own conceptuality: ‘It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly kernal of the misty creations of religions than to do the opposite, i.e., to develop from the actual, given relations of life the forms in which they have become apotheosized. The latter method is the only materialist, and therefore the only scientific one. The weakness of the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism which excludes the historical process, are immediately evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions expressed by its spokesmen whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality’ (Marx 1990: 494, fn 4). See Postone (1993) for a critique of Marxian economics as a series of programmatic statements about the rational planning of essentially capitalist labour relations. Contemporary notions of anti-austerity as a politics of economic planning present the same misconceived idea. See for example Panitch etal (2010) and Varoufakis (2013). For critique, see Bonefeld (2012) and Grollios (2016). For the critique of political economy the transformation of ‘every product into a social hieroglyphic’ requires explanation from within the actual social relations. We need, says Marx, ‘to get behind the secret of [men’s] own social product: for the characteristic which objects of utility have of being values is as much men’s social product as is their language’. Thus, the fetishism of commodities ‘arises from the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them’ (167, 165), and not from some presumed natural materiality of labour. As the tradition of dialectical materialism argues wrongly. On this point, see also footnote 1. Rather, the purpose of the critique of political economy is to establish the actual relations of life in their perverted appearance as real economic abstractions. Critique of economic categories is social critique. It is critique of the capitalist social relations as a system of objective illusion that in the form of real economic abstractions asserts itself as a force of nature. The critique of political economy does not amount to an alternative economic science. It rather negates the economic categories as inverted forms of historically specific social relations of human reproduction. Human sensuous practice exists thus in the economic form of a super-sensible world of economic things. There is only one reality. Society is the economic thing, which is the inverted world. It contains the human subject within itself as personification of her own social world (see Reichelt, 2005). That is, however inhospitable to the social individuals, the objective world of real economic abstraction is the constituted world of the social subject. Social reproduction appears thus to be governed by fate, that is, economic objectivity entails the assertion of the economic laws as forces ‘external to Man’ and as forces on which as Adorno (1990: 320) put it, ‘the life of all men hangs by . . . [to the] vanishing point in the death of all’ – and yet what asserts itself behind their back is their own world. Men as the essence of society appears thus in the mischief [Unwesen] of a world that degrades them to a means of economic abstractions. What prevails over man prevails in and through them. Sensuous human practice subsists against itself in the form of, say, freedom as wage slavery. What lies within the concept of capitalist wealth – of value as surplus value – is its social nature. As personifications of real economic abstractions, the actions of the economic agents endow the inverted world of economic necessity with a consciousness and a will – and they do this ‘without being aware of it’ (Marx 1990: 166-67). Marx’s critique of political economy holds that the incomprehensible economic forces find their rational explanation in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice. It argues that the relations of economic objectivity manifest the social nature of an inverted [verkehrte] and perverted [verru¨ckte] world of definite social relations. That is, it amounts ‘to a conceptualized praxis [begriffene Praxis]’ of the capitalist social relations in the form of real economic abstractions (Schmidt 1974: 207). Marx's work focuses on forms, at first on forms of consciousness (i.e., religion and law), then later on the forms of political economy. Following Reichelt (2000: 105) this focus ‘on forms was identical with the critique of the inverted forms of social existence, an existence constituted by the life-practice of human beings'. That is, every social 'form', even the most simple form like, for example, the commodity, 'is already an inversion and causes relations between people to appear as attributes of things' or, more emphatically, each form is a 'perverted form', which causes the social relations to appear as a movement of coins that govern the individuals as adjustable derivatives of the economic forces of cash, price and profit (Marx 1976: 508; Marx 1990: 169). The movement of ‘coins’ expresses a definite social relationship between individuals subsisting as a relationship between things and coins, and in this relationship the actual social relations subsist but as coined factors of production. In capitalism individuals are really governed by the movement of coins. Although coins tend to inflate or become depressed, coins are not subjects. Yet, they impose themselves on, and also in and through, the person to the point of madness and disaster, from the socially necessary consciousness of cash and product, money and profit, to abject misery and bloodshed. Capitalist wealth is money as more money, and the necessity of more money objectifies itself in the persons as mere ‘agents of value’ who depend for their life on the manner in which the logic of things unfolds. What a monstrosity! An economic thing, this coin, that really is nothing more than a piece of metal manifests itself as an economic quantity in fateful movement, asserts a power by which ‘the life of all men hangs by’. That is, the mythological idea of fate becomes no less mythical when it is demythologised “into a secular ‘logic of things’” that akin to an abstract system-logic structures the economic behaviours of the actual individuals by means of competing price signals (Adorno 1990: 311, 320, 319). The secular logic of things entails the bourgeois concept of social equality as a real abstraction. That is, equality of every member of society before money and before the rule of law is entirely formal in character. It recognises individuals as abstract citizens, each endowed with standardised rights, regardless of the inequality in property. Furthermore, their formal equality as abstract citizens endowed with equal rights to trade at liberty from direct coercion bound only by the rule of law, is governed by the money fetish. That is, the ‘power which each individual exercises over the activity of others or over social wealth exists in him as the owner of exchange value, of money. The individual carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket’ (Marx 1973: 156-57). Marx writes of the money fetish that ‘a social relation, a definite relation between individuals … appears as a metal, a stone, as a purely physical external thing which can be found, as such, in nature, and which is indistinguishable in form from its natural existence’ (1973: 239). Economic objectivity is a socially constituted objectivity – the social relations vanish in their appearance as a metal or a stone, and this appearance is real as power over, and in and through, them. What appears in the appearance of society as an economic object, is a definite social relationship between individuals subsisting as relationship between economic things. The movement of economic things governs the class divided individuals as formally equal citizens who, in and through their struggle for social reproduction, endow pieces of metal with a consciousness and a will. This will asserts itself in the form of a seemingly natural force and regulation by invisible principles. Society appears as some transcendental thing that governs the social individuals by means of an ‘invisible hand’, which takes ‘care of both the beggar and the king’ (Adorno 1990: 251). Marx grasps rule by economic abstractions with the category of capital. Capital is fundamentally just a name of a definite form of social relations. On this, see Bonefeld (2014). Capital is society as economic thing, and this thing is fundamentally the value thing. Value is invisible, like a ghost (Bellofiore, 2009). The ghost of value appears in the form of money as more money. To the point of ‘omentary barbarism’ (Marx and Engels 1997: 18) the class tied to work hangs by the profitable exploitation of her labour power. She maintains her employability, and therewith wage-based access to subsistence, only as an effective producer of surplus value. The buyer of labour power and the producers of surplus value contract on the labour market as formally equal citizens. The buyer contracts labour power as resource of profit. The worker sells to make a living. Labour time that does not produce profit counts for nothing. It is either expended for profit or redundant. For the sake of profit, there is no time to lose. Unprofitable employers go bankrupt, leading to loss of employment. The notion that capitalist society is ruled by abstractions says therefore more than it first appeared. Life-time is labour time. The struggle for life-time is constant, and so is the struggle to sustain access to the means of life by making a profit for the buyer of labour power. Economic objectivity hides what is important. Hidden within the appearance of society as a movement of economic quantities, vanished from view, is the sheer unrest of life to make ends meet – for the labourer, working for the profit of another class of Man is the necessary condition of making a living. That is, the labourer makes a living on the condition that the consumption of her labour power produces a surplus value for its buyer. What can the seller of redundant labour power trade in its stead – body and body substances: how many for pornography, how many for prostitution, how many for drug mules, how many for kidney sales? The macro-economic calculation of the unemployed as economic zeros is not untrue. It makes clear that the life of the sellers of labour power really depend for their life on the profitability extraction of surplus value from their labour. Labouring for the sake of a surplus in value is innate to the concept of the worker. She belongs to a system of wealth in which her labour has utility only as a means of profit. Sensuous activity not only vanishes in the supersensible world of economic things, of cash, price, and profit. It also appears in it – as working class struggle to sustain access to the means of subsistence and as conflict on competitive labour markets to avoid the risk of redundancy. It also appears as competition between the employers of labour power to avoid bankruptcy as each tries in competition with all others to validate their private appropriation of social labour in the form of value, that is, money as general equivalent of the socially necessary expenditure of labour time. The economic argument that profit is a means of avoiding bankruptcy is not untrue. It articulates the truth of society as economic abstraction. Each individual capitalist has constantly to expand 'his capital, so as to preserve it, but he can only extend by means of progressive accumulation' (Marx 1990: 739). Thus each individual capitalist is spurred into action to maintain his connection to abstract wealth by means of greater surplus value extraction, on the pain of avoiding competitive erosion and liquidation of existing values. Each individual capitalist is therefore compelled to compress necessary labour time of social reproduction so as to increase the surplus labour time of surplus value production, expanding wealth in the form of profit by multiplying the productive power of labour. The fact that the rule of economic abstractions benefits the owners of great wealth does not entail that they are in control. The personalised critique of capitalism does not touch capitalism by thought. Rather, it both rejects the capitalist as corrupting capitalist development for its own self-interest and identifies capital as an economic instrument that can be employed for the benefit of the properyless producers of surplus value. In this manner the critique of the capitalist transforms into an argument for the further development of capitalism, ostensibly for the benefit of the class that works. For the sake of making capitalism work for the workers, it argues for the full-employment of social labour and envisages the transformation of society into a centrally planned factory. Leninism is not an alternative to capitalism, nor are its reformist competitors or radical off-springs. Real abstraction and the Time of Wealth I have argued that the commodity form disappears as a social relationship; instead it asserts an abstract economic logic, which manifests the vanished social subject as a personification of objective economic laws. The capitalist social subject is a value subject of profitable equivalent exchange relations. The argument of this section expounds the meaning of this last sentence. It starts with an exploration of the contradictory character of profitable equivalent exchange relations. Exchange is either an exchange between equivalent values or it is profitable; in bourgeois society it is both – a contradiction in terms, which is immanent to its objective illusion. The capitalist exchange relations are equivalent exchange relations. Between two equal values there is no difference or distinction. Exchange equivalence is entirely abstract in that it is indifferent to the concrete utility of the things that are exchanged. Exchange equivalence expresses something invisible that is neither divine nor natural in character. In Marx’s argument it expresses the private appropriation of socially necessary labour time in the form of money as general equivalent of capitalist wealth (Marx 1990: chap. 1, sect. 3). The exchange-value of a commodity appears as a definite amount of money. In the form of money capitalist wealth manifests the ‘continually vanishing realisation of value’ (Marx 1973: 209). Once value is expressed in the form of money, it has to be posited again and again to maintain its ‘occult ability to add value to itself’ (Marx 1990: 255) – money is thrown into circulation to beget more money, which is realised in the form of profit by means of an equivalent exchange (M…M’, say £100=£120). The conceptuality of this ‘bewitched’ reality of an equivalent exchange between money and more money is independent ‘of the consciousness of the human beings subjected to it’ (Adorno 1976: 80) at the same time as which it prevails only in and through the social individuals themselves. The private appropriation of socially labour acquires value validity in exchange with money as the equivalent form of wealth. What is not validated is devalued and destroyed regardless of the human needs that could be satisfied. Money validates the value of things. ‘Illusion dominates reality’ (Adorno 1976: 80) and it does so because ‘[e]xchange value, merely a mental configuration when compared with use value, dominates human needs and replaces them’ (ibid.). Understanding of the relations of production is key to unlocking the social constitution of money as the automatic fetish of capitalist wealth, that is, wealth in the form of a real abstraction. In Marx’s argument, the concept of socially necessary labour time is the most important. Marx’s familiar definition of the social constitution of value – ‘socially necessary labour time is the labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society’ – expresses the social character of the private appropriation of labour in the form of a universal commensurability of a time made abstract (Marx 1990: 129). This time appears in homogeneous units that add to themselves, seemingly from time-immemorial to eternity. Time appears as a force of its own progress, moving forward relentlessly by adding units of time to itself, as if it were a force of nature that ticks and tocks human life dissociated from the time of actual events. This appearance is real. In capitalism ‘time is ontologised’ (Adorno 1990: 331). This ontologised time is the time of value, and the time of value is the time of socially necessary labour. The time of value is a real abstraction. It asserts itself in exchange as an equivalent exchange between equal units of social labour time. On this, see Bonefeld (2010). The holy trinity of social labour, socially necessary labour time, and value-validity in exchange is invisible. Its objectivity is spectral. Nevertheless, the ghostlike objectivity of value becomes visible in the money form; back in production the ghost turns into a Vampire that feeds on living labour as the human material of value that begets a surplus and is thus greater than itself (see Bellofiore 2009: 185). Socially necessary labour time is not fixed and given. The labour time that ‘was yesterday undoubtedly socially necessary for the production of a yard of linen, ceases to be so to-day’ (Marx 1990: 202). Whether the concrete expenditure of labour time is valid as socially necessary labour time can only be established post-festum in exchange. On the pain of ruin, the expenditure of living labour is thus done in the hope that it will turn out to be socially necessary and that it will thus achieve value-validity in exchange with money. ‘Time is money’, said Benjamin Franklin, and one might add that therefore money is time. If then, capitalism reduces everything to time, an abstract time, divisible into equal, homogeneous, and constant units that move on from unit to unit, dissociated from concrete human circumstances and purposes, then, time really is everything. If ‘time is everything, [then] man is nothing; he is, at the most, time’s carcase’ (Marx 1975: 127) – a carcass of ‘personified labour-time’ (Marx 1990: 352-53). Expenditure of socially valid labour does not occur in in its own good time. It occurs within time, that is the time of value as expenditure of socially necessary labour time. The abstraction of the exchange process, which Sohn Rethel’s term real abstraction highlights, ‘lies therefore not in the abstracting mode of though by the sociologist, but in society itself’ (Adorno 2000: 32). That is, ‘the conversion of all commodities into labour-time is no greater an abstraction, but is no less real, than the resolution of all organic bodies into air’ (Marx 1971: 30). The time of capitalist labour appears in the form of a profitable accumulation of some abstract form of wealth, of money that yields more money. What cannot be turned into profit is burned. The capitalist exchange relations posit the exchange of money for more money as an equivalent exchange (M…M’). What appears in the appearance of an equivalent exchange of money as more money is the difference between the value of social labour power and the labour-time expended by the worker on the production of social wealth. The value of labour power is the socially necessary labour time required for the social reproduction of labour power. It is thus the time needed for the reproduction of a class of workers. The employment of labour power reproduces this value of labour power during a certain part of the working day, which Marx calls necessary labour time. Any time spend at work beyond this labour time is in surplus to the reproduction of the value of labour time. Marx calls this labour time surplus labour time. It is the time of surplus value production. The mysterious character of an equivalent exchange of money for more money has thus to do with the transformation of the commodity labour power into a surplus value producing labour activity (M…P...M’). M…P…M’ (or M…M’, for short) is the classical expressions for the transformation of Money into the Production of essentially surplus value that is realised in exchange in the form of greater amount of Money that expresses the extracted surplus value in the form of profit. See Bonefeld (1996) for a fuller account. For the sake of more money, the reduction of the labour-time spent by the worker to reproduce her life is of the essence. It is the condition for extending the labour time beyond the time necessary for the (simple) reproduction of society. This extended labour time comprises the surplus labour time that expands social wealth, creating a surplus in value, the foundation of profit. The understanding, then, of the mysterious character of an equivalence exchange between unequal values lies ‘in the concept of surplus value’ (Adorno 1997[1962]: 508). Expanding on Sohn-Rethel’s concept of real abstraction as a matter arising in exchange, Adorno thus argues that the equivalence exchange relations are founded ‘on the class relationship’ between the owners of the means of production and the producers of surplus value, and he argues that this social relationship vanishes in its economic appearance as an exchange between one quantity of money for another (506). Society as real abstraction of economic objectivity encompasses surplus value extraction as its hidden premise. Conclusion Neither the capitalist nor the banker, nor indeed the worker can extricate themselves from the reality in which they live and which asserts itself not only over them but also through them, and by means of them. Society as economic subject prevails through the individuals. Money does not only make the world go round; its possession establishes the connection to the means of life. The struggle for access to the means of life is a struggle for money – it governs the mentality of bourgeois society. What a misery! In the face of great social wealth, the producers of surplus value sustain themselves from one day to the next as the readily available human material for capitalist wealth. Indeed, making ends meet is the real life-activity of living labour. Nothing is what it seems. The struggle for money (as more money) governs the mentality of bourgeois society as, seemingly, a thing in-itself. The ‘movement of society’ is not only ‘antagonistic from the outset’ (Adorno 1990: 304). It also ‘maintains itself only through antagonism’ (311). That is, class struggle is the objective necessity of the false society. It belongs to its concept. Hidden within ∆K rages the struggle to make ends meet and achieve social reproduction. On ∆K see footnote 2. The working class does not struggle for socialism. It struggles to satisfied its needs. The struggle of the dispossessed sellers of labour power is ‘dictated by hunger’ (Adorno 2005: 102). In distinction to traditional Marxist conceptions, to be productive labourer is not an ontologically privileged position. Rather, ‘it is a great misfortune’ (Marx 1990: 644). In Capital, Marx develops the capitalist class relations from the sale of the commodity labour power. However, the trade in labour power presupposes the divorce of dependent labour from the means of subsistence, creating the property-less labourer as the independent seller of labour power. Coercion as the foundation of the sale of labour and economic compulsion is the condition of the free and equal trade in labour power (see Bonefeld, 2011). On the one hand, the labour market is the institution of the buying and selling of labour power on the basis of contract between formally equal traders, the one buying for the sake of making a profit, the other selling for the sake of making a living. On the other it comprises labour market competition between individualised sellers of labour power, each seeking to maintain themselves in gendered and racialised, and also nationalised labour markets where the term cutthroat competition is experienced in various forms, from arson attack to class solidarity, and from destitution to collective bargaining, from gangland thuggery to communal forms of organising subsistence-support, from strike-breaking to collective action. Innate to the existence of a class of dispossessed sellers of labour power is the struggle, collectively or against each other, or both, for access to the means of subsistence. The struggle of the working class is one for wages and conditions; it is a struggle for access to the means of life and for life. It is a struggle against the buyer’s ‘were-wolf’s hunger for surplus labour’ and appropriation of additional atoms of unpaid labour time, and thus against the reduction of their life to a mere time’s carcase. They struggle against a life constituting solely of labour-time and thus against a reduction of human life to a mere economic resource; and they struggle for employment to establish access to the means of life. They thus struggle for human significance, and above all for food, shelter, clothing, warmth, love, affection, knowledge, time for enjoyment, and dignity. Their struggle as a class ‘in-itself’ really is a struggle ‘for-itself’: for life, human distinction, life-time, and above all, satisfaction of basic human needs. The working class struggles for making ends meet, for subsistence and comfort. It does all of this in conditions, in which the increase in material wealth that it has produced, pushes beyond the limits of its capitalist form. And then, repeating an earlier quotation, society ‘suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence’ (Marx and Engels 1997: 18). The dictum that ‘capital is class struggle’ (Holloway 1991: 170) does not express something positive or desirable. Rather, it amounts to a judgement on the capitalistically organized social relations of production, in which ‘the needs of human beings, the satisfaction of human beings, is never more than a sideshow’ (Adorno 2008: 51). The class struggle is the dynamic force of society as the thing of real economic abstraction, of wealth as a value abstraction. In conclusion, the critique of class society does not find its positive resolution in the achievement of fair and just exchange relations between the buyers of labour power and the producers of surplus value. Redistribution of wealth in favour of property-less workers ‘who chew word to fill their bellies’ (Adorno 2005: 102) is absolutely necessary to sustain them in greater comfort. For this reason, redistribution is also the convenient fiction of a socialist critique, which envisages capitalist transformation in the form of a labour economy that is comfortable for the wage slaves. The critique of class society finds its positive resolution only in the classless society, in which the social individuals no longer objectivity themselves in the form of a movement of real economic abstractions that are fed by a dependent class of surplus value producers. Rather this society objectifies itself as a society of communist individuals. References Adorno, Theodor (1976) ‘Sociology and Empirical Research’, trans. G. Adey, D. Frisby, T. Adorno, H. Albert, R. Dahrendorf, J. Habermas, J. Pilot and K. Popper, The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology. London: Heinemann, pp. 68–86. 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