This makes capital for Horkheimer “a subject only in an improper sense,” or for Adorno “a global subject devoid of subjectivity,” which is often lost in contemporary capital-as-subject talk, though its ‘blindness’ was a recurring topos of early 20th century marxism. 1/10 https://twitter.com/chrisokaneutrgv/status/1343580792379858945

To take only one of countless examples of the theme, Pannekoek in 1909 refers to capital as “a gigantic unintelligent body” “senselessly devastating more and more the environment from which it lives.” 2/10

The issue is significant because for Adorno, “the blindness of society” should be “measured critically against” its own “potentially self-determining subjectivity,” and communism essentially entails the development of a “self-conscious global subject”— 3/10

one no longer abstracted from (and antagonistic to) individual subjectivities, but that “makes transparent the dialectic of individual and species,” enabling “the communication of the differentiated,” “differentiation without domination.” 4/10

In our view, this is intelligible as the global power of the councils, as Adorno himself occasionally let slip. Yet he of course also envisioned communism as the abolition (or, variously, minimization, or de-centering) of labor. 5/10

The situationists are now routinely pilloried for being incoherently committed to the abolition of labor via workers’ councils, but we contend this was also Adorno’s position, and he helps to show how it is not in fact incoherent or paradoxical. 6/10

The focus on capital’s ‘blindness’ (with ‘planning’ as remedy) is seen by Postone as the lynchpin of ‘traditional marxism,’ whereas a critical one ought to focus on labor and its overcoming— but it should be obvious these can’t be neatly separated. 7/10

Postone, perhaps despite himself, nonetheless still registers the nonidentity of capital-as-(blind)-subject and subjectivity in his recurring qualification that the former is *quasi*-autonomous. 8/10

Riccardo Bellofiore, great as he usually is, disappointingly chides Tony Smith for a similar move—referring to capital as a *pseudo*-subject—which he puts down to insufficient comprehension of the NML canon. 9/10

But this sort of move’s materialist motive is articulated on pages 10-28 of Adorno’s Hegel book. Grasping that a subject is no longer one “in a proper sense” if severed from empirical consciousness(es) is the difference between a critical theory and value-form Fichteanism. 10/10