“A False Classless Society”: Adorno’s social theory revisited

Differential integration: social totality and its contradictions

The first question on our agenda is how to square Adorno’s references to class with his emphasis on the totalizing and integrative nature of twentieth-century capitalism. But before turning to his discussion of class, we need to say a few words about what he and fellow Frankfurt-School members termed late capitalism or monopoly capitalism. In brief, the thesis is that capitalism reached a stage in which it succeeded in bringing about a relatively stable improvement to large segments of the working class. ¹⁶ Adorno sees this development as a material factor that should be incorporated into a Marxist framework, rather than making this framework irrelevant. What is required is a Marxist approach that de-emphasizes the so-called “immiseration thesis”: the claim that capitalist dynamics, even if it improves workers’ condition in the short run, increases overall poverty in the long run. ¹⁷ Capitalism reached a stage in which it can better predict, manage, and forestall crises, including labor protests, by mitigating working conditions and improving welfare—all based on the realization that such conduct is actually more rational from capitalism’s perspective. “In the advanced industrial societies,” Adorno writes, “so long as no natural economic catastrophes occur in defiance of Keynes, people have learned to prevent an all-too-visible poverty.” ¹⁸ This is not to say absolute poverty has been abolished, that severe economic gaps no longer exist or that this system is no longer exploitative. What it does mean, however, is that capitalism’s learning curve reached a point where it can perform a fine balancing act, in which economic hardship, while not eliminated, is kept within proportions that allow the smooth continuation of business as usual.

We should not read this as a deterministic claim, to the effect that this dynamic is always successful, and no unforeseen crises or riots occasionally erupt. But the point is that the quantity of immiseration shows no significant signs of turning into a quality: no transition from so-called relative to absolute poverty. Economic hardship is not reaching a level that might stir mass movements that would amount to more than temporary outbursts of discontent or “arms-wrestling” between labor and capital. Hence, Marxists cannot rely on the thought that immiseration would push the proletariat to take revolutionary action out of sheer material desperation. Once capitalism managed to successfully expand beyond a certain point, it has reached what we might call a reflexive stage. Capitalists begin to operate on the basis of a longer-term strategy, in which the stability and reliability of the work-force becomes part of the utility-maximizing calculus of surplus-value. Adorno’s conclusion from all this is that critical theory must itself become reflexive about capitalism’s reflexivity.

How, then, do classes function under such conditions? In this reflexive stage of capitalism the fundamental labor/capital class distinction manifests itself not as a conflict but as a mitigated and coordinated tension at best. To repeat, Adorno is still committed to the basic Marxian view that capitalism is a class society. It would not be what it is without the continued distinction between a relatively small group of owners of means of production (or means of surplus-value creation more broadly) versus a far larger group who can only sell its labor power. This remains a qualitative distinction that cannot be reduced to a quantitative difference between people, such as the difference in their level of income, or as Marx put it, “the size of one’s purse.” ¹⁹ At the same time, and herein lies his main point on the matter, Adorno argues this constitutive class distinction does not manifest itself in subjective social experience; and that this incompatibility between class structure and “classless” experience is part of the modus operandi of our society.

Adorno makes this argument on two levels. First, with respect to the situation within each of the two classes, capitalists and proletarians; and second, with respect to the relations between the two. On the first, intra-class level, Adorno’s argument is that “membership in the same class by no means translates into equality of interests and action.” ²⁰ The objective class structure does not translate into an experience of shared class-consciousness, neither among proletarians nor capitalists. On the second, inter-class level, namely the way society as a whole is experienced by its members, the class structure is effaced from everyone’s social experience, regardless of their class position, because the similarities between the classes become more present than their structural distinction.

Let us begin with how the incompatibility between objective conditions and subjective experience is manifest within the capitalist class. Building on the work of fellow Frankfurt School economists, Adorno points out that late capitalism, sometimes referred to as monopoly capitalism, is marked by a dual tendency: competition alongside monopoly-formation. ²¹ Depending on their relative strength in the market, capitalists move between the two strategies. In circumstances when no player is strong enough, capitalism plays out as market competition. Yet when conditions are ripe, each player strives to employ coercive methods that would reshape the conditions of competition so as to secure monopoly (whether monopoly over the labor market, the consumer market, raw materials, technologies, patents, credit, prices, etc.). This duality of market-based accumulation and coercive accumulation, of competition and monopolization, does not imply that really-existing capitalism falls short of some ideal capitalism, in which perfect competition would indeed be the norm. The thesis is rather that this duality is an essential feature of capitalism, generated by its own dynamic.

This inherent duality of capitalist dynamics is closely related to yet another duality. Capitalist accumulation requires certain initial background conditions: turning populations into a labor market, turning a field of production into one based on commodity manufacturing, opening up a consumer market for those commodities, etc. But such background conditions are never achieved through purely capitalist means. This is essentially Marx’s “primitive accumulation” thesis, with the additional emphasis that this is not a one-time process that “launches” capitalism, but a process that reappears whenever capitalism has to make a leap or overcome an immanent crisis. ²² In other words, accumulation based on surplus-value is always in symbiosis with accumulation by dispossession, as David Harvey puts it. ²³

Adorno’s contribution, however, lies not in this analysis of late-capitalist dynamics, but in the constitutive tension he points to between these objective conditions—how capitalism functions—and their corresponding subjective conditions—how capitalists experience those conditions. Capitalists must act as if the system is one of pure market competition, while knowing full well they are subjected to coercive and monopolistic measures that distort competition, and that they themselves would resort to such measures if circumstances would allow it. This is what Adorno refers to as capitalists’ “feudal” or “conquistador” mentality. ²⁴ Hence his conclusion that, while capitalists do make up a distinct class in the traditional Marxist sense—owners of means of production driven by the logic of surplus accumulation—they do not exhibit a unified class consciousness. Capitalists exert among themselves a coercion under the pretense of “market forces,” which is not entirely unlike the coercion they exert towards workers. Exploitation is not only a feature of the relation between the capitalist and proletarian class but also an internal feature within the capitalist class: exploitation amongst the exploiters.

Let us turn to the working class. Because late capitalism integrates the interests of labor into its calculations, workers are driven away from developing joint class-consciousness: consciousness of their common denominator as those who are not in control over production and are only sellers of their labor time. Furthermore, the pressures exerted on workers often push them towards a mentality of “cliques.” The prime example Adorno gives is the temptation of labor-unions to betray their purpose. He mentions the examples of competition between old and new generations of workers, stably-employed workers versus temporary precariat, exploitation of non-unionized by unionized workers, etc. Contrary to the earlier, less reflexive phase of capitalism, in which conflicts between labor and capital were more obvious, under late capitalism the relative improvement in working conditions, and the higher coordination between labor and capital, open up both the possibility and the material incentive for labor unions to become what Adorno calls a “labor aristocracy.” ²⁵ It is not that workers fail to realize they are all exploited and have nothing to lose. Rather, under late capitalist conditions, they realize they have something to gain by partaking in the general system of exploitation, through the formation of internal hierarchies within the working class.

Here too Adorno’s point is that this incompatibility—the objective condition of being proletarian versus the non-existence of proletarian class-consciousness—is itself an efficacious, operative quality of our society. ²⁶ This does not imply the concept of class is no longer relevant. What it implies is that the lack of class consciousness, and the conditions that generate this lack, should be incorporated into our concept of what a class society means. Here is how Adorno puts it:

If there really is a gradual process whereby those who are objectively defined… as proletarians are no longer conscious of themselves as such, and even whereby they emphatically reject such a consciousness… In that case, despite the objective situation, the use of the traditional concept of class can easily become a dogma or a fetish… [If] the proletarians… no longer even know that they are proletarians, the practical appeal to them takes on an ideological moment. ²⁷

Let us now move to the incompatibility between structure and consciousness in the second, inter-class level: how society as a whole is experienced by its members. Here the argument is that the homology between the lived experiences of the two classes outweighs the objective difference between them. Not only does the class distinction not translate into class antagonism, it actually assumes a new quality that can be called differential integration. We already encountered the first feature of this differential integration or cross-class homology: the relations within the working class mirror the relations within the capitalist class, and also mirror the relation between the capitalist class and the working class. That is, both intra-class and inter-class relations are marked by competitiveness, monopolization of power, securing of privileges and exploitation. While the constitutive difference between workers and capitalists is retained—workers do not own the means of production nor have any significant control over the allocation of surplus value—what is significantly manifest in social experience is not this structural difference but rather the way workers exhibit features of small-scale capitalists. Workers invest their savings, are involved in the stock market through pension funds and personal portfolios, and can themselves be exploitative in their consuming habits vis-à-vis workers in less-developed countries.

A second feature of differential integration is the spread of consumerist mentality across the class divide. The more workers progress economically beyond the satisfaction of basic needs, the more the homology between workers and capitalists counteracts and removes from experience the objective class difference. The fact that even production-line workers drive to the factory in their private cars is more significant than the difference between the affordable car they drive and the luxury model owned by their boss. ²⁸ The fact that different groups can afford different levels of products and do their shopping in different stores is less significant than the fact they are all appealed to as consumers by the advertising industry—even while they are “targeted” as different market-segments.

A third feature of differential integration is the shared social experience of fear and precarity. Once again, the point is that the ubiquity of this experience across the class divide is more significant than the fact that it manifests itself differently in the different classes. Certainly, there is a difference between a financier trading in derivatives, who is worried about the possibility of market collapse due to over-financialization, versus a blue-collar worker who is suddenly unable to afford paying the mortgage because of how it was “packaged” into those derivatives and traded in the stock market. But according to Adorno, more crucial than this difference is the fact that both these figures experience their social existence as precarious: the experience that one’s life-chances are not under one’s control but are subject to market forces, and that the promise of fair competition is a façade. “Class-membership today shows a mobility that allows the rigidity of the economic order itself to be forgotten… [Economic] downfall is decided not by incompetence but by an opaque hierarchical structure in which no-one, scarcely even those at the very top, can feel secure: an egalitarian threat.” ²⁹

To recap, the key characteristic of this society is the contradiction between the fact that it is still founded on the capital/labor division versus the fact that this division does not manifest itself as class-consciousness. Instead, it is the similarity between the social experiences of the two, despite the objective difference between them, that is the determinate quality of that society. Once again, when saying the class divide is not manifest on the experiential level, this “not” needs to be understood dialectically: it does not indicate something missing from society but rather a present and productive quality of it. The class divide that is definitive of capitalism (capital/labor) is a qualitative difference that cannot be reduced to a quantitative one (who has more and who has less), and yet it is nonetheless experienced as qualitative, as a continuum rather than a binary divide.

Between social structure and social experience: ideology and the ideological view of ideology

When Adorno argues for the incompatibility between social structure and social experience, the point is not that social experience is purely subjective and hence epiphenomenal vis-à-vis the social structure which is objective. Nor is it correct to say that the social experience of differential integration is plain and simply a false representation of the social structure. The reason both these interpretations are problematic is that they ignore the way social experience is an active factor in sustaining society. This is what Adorno, still following Marx, understands under the heading of ideology. ³⁰

As is often the case with Adorno, his treatment of ideology suffers from his unfriendly writing style. In order to overcome the problem, we shall turn to a perhaps unexpected ally, who develops similar theses to those of Adorno regarding ideology, albeit in a somewhat clearer manner: Louis Althusser. What follows is not an attempt at a systemic comparison between the two thinkers, who were quite oblivious of each other, and operated in two distinct intellectual worlds—despite the later tendency to lump them together under headings like “critical theory” or “late Marxism.” What is proposed here is simply that, on certain points, the similarity between the two is illuminating-enough that we can use Althusser’s clearer explanations to explicate Adorno’s telegraphic ones.

Not unlike Adorno, Althusser too is of the mind that “the complex whole” of capitalist society “cannot be envisaged without its contradictions.” ³¹ Here too this interplay of totality and contradiction is tightly related to the interplay of social structure and social experience. Let us then start with what is perhaps Althusser’s best definition of ideology. Note how, in the following passage, what Althusser refers to as people’s “real relation” versus their “imaginary relation” to their social conditions parallels what we termed objective class structure and subjective social experience:

[Ideology is] not the relation between [human beings] and their conditions of existence, but the way they live the relation between them and their conditions of existence… In ideology the real relation is inevitably invested in the imaginary relation, a relation that expresses a will (conservative, conformist, reformist or revolutionary), a hope or a nostalgia, rather than describing a reality. ³²

Consider the following brief illustrations. The tendency of former welfare-states to cut social services like health and education is often experienced by low-income populations as a positive development. But to say that they are blindly buying into anti-welfare propaganda would be too simplistic. Many of them do experience the reduction in welfare taxation as a newfound freedom: the freedom to spend a meagre salary on cheap imported goods or an exotic vacation package; or freedom from “government intervention” in favor of an ethics of personal economic choice regarding what to do with one’s money. Another example: an investment manager might manipulate the stocks of numerous client portfolios, so that the overall outcome would benefit the firm’s portfolio more significantly; yet when the market collapses, they are likely to experience it as a contingent calamity rather than a systemic, aggregate product of the actions of their like. Or consider a labor organizer, who would have no problem preaching solidarity among colleagues of their own generation of workers, while making a deal with the management to prevent costly rights from the next generation of workers. None of these is strictly a matter of blind faith in some fairytale about how society functions, nor a mere refusal of these actors to “look social reality in the eye,” so to speak. It is a matter of social actors holding on to a belief about how society works, in a manner that both sustains that society and, in a feedback loop, sustains the social life of those actors. As Adorno puts it: “[Ideology] is consciousness which is objectively necessary and yet at the same time false, the intertwining of truth and falsehood, which is just as distinct from the whole truth as it is from the pure lie.” ³³

In other words, ideology is not a mask of lies that hides the way actors function. “Ideology is not an extraneous false consciousness but is something that sustains the entire [social] mechanism.” ³⁴ To return to a previous example, it is not that capitalists lie when they present their economic conduct as free competition, whereas in reality it is an opportunistic mixture of competitiveness and monopolization. The point is that they nonetheless do act as if this is the case; and this “acting as if” is as much an integral part of social reality as the capitalist mode of production is. Adorno further argues this logic has its origin in what Marx analyzed as commodity fetishism. We treat commodities in such a way that they function both as use-values and exchange-values:

On the one hand, commodity fetishism is an illusion; on the other, it is utmost/ultimate reality… the categories of illusion are in truth also categories of reality… false consciousness itself appears as a necessary form of the objective process that holds society together. ³⁵

So the term “false consciousness” is problematic if “false” implies that this consciousness is not efficacious; that it is a sheer mistake or veil; that the fact that it is not the whole truth about society means that it is not real or epiphenomenal. While the ideological view of society is indeed not the whole truth about society, it is nonetheless a formative and necessary part of that truth: not strictly its opposite or a complete misrepresentation of it. ³⁶

This analysis of ideology, however, takes us back to the two problems with which we began. First, if differential integration and its accompanying ideology is indeed so ubiquitous, what kind of critical position might be adopted with respect to it? In other words, is this merely a description of how ideology functions or is this also some form of ideology-critique? Second—and this will be treated in the next section—who might such critique be addressed to, if Adorno gives up on proletarian class-consciousness?

The first problem, ideology-critique, is one that Adorno places squarely on the table. “Even if we see through illusion, this does not change the fetish-character of the commodity: every businessman who calculates has to act according to this fetish. If he does not calculate in this way, he goes broke.” ³⁷ Althusser makes the same point in an even harsher manner: “Marx never believed that an ideology might be dissipated by a knowledge of it: for the knowledge of this ideology… is simultaneously knowledge of the conditions of its necessity.” ³⁸ Since ideology is not a veil covering over true social reality, ideology-critique should not be thought of as an act of lifting that veil to uncover the truth beneath it. It is not a matter of exposing what lies underneath ideology, since ideology is part of social reality.

It is significant that Adorno is so explicit about this problem. While he does not argue there is a simple, straightforward solution to it, he does argue there is nonetheless something to learn from how not to conceptualize ideology. For Adorno, a crucial part of the critique of ideology is the critique of what Althusser refers to as “the ideological representation of ideology” or “the ideology of ideology.” ³⁹ Namely the critique of a problematic kind of critique of ideology; or better yet, the critique of immanent misconceptions of ideology—immanent in the sense that they themselves are the product of late-capitalist differential integration.

Here too Althusser makes more explicitly a thesis that is rather too condensed in Adorno. Althusser gives the example of what he calls the “mythological” or “science fiction” representation of ideology, which portrays social compliance as something that is maintained through the powers-that-be “placing an individual gendarme up every person’s ass.” ⁴⁰ He argues there is something symptomatic about this kind of mistake, which sees things in terms of “vertical” enforcement or policing: a dualistic power-relation between dominators and dominated. We should remember that Althusser is not sparing anyone here: he thinks such misconceptions are equally prevalent among liberals as they are among Marxists (the so-called “humanist-Marxist” approach, which emphasizes Marx’s early writings, and to the critique of which Althusser dedicated much energy). Indeed, it is not a convenient thought that for the most part no violent enforcement is involved in sustaining ideology, and that those “at the bottom”—if this spatial image is even relevant—are also complicit through their self-policing. Yet another false kind of critique of ideology relies on understanding ideology in terms of conspiracy or manipulation. This view too is problematic because it suggests a two-side division between manipulators and manipulated: those who author the play, so to speak, and those trapped in it as mere characters “acting out” a script. As Althusser never tires of noting, there is no secret committee pulling the strings behind the stage, fully aware of how social reality truly is. Even those who yield the most political or economic decision-making power are immersed in ideology just as much as those who have less power.

Back to Adorno, recall his above-cited claim that, under current conditions, seeing the proletariat as a subject of social transformation “takes on an ideological moment.” ⁴¹ Although still committed to Marxist class theory, Adorno is concerned about the investment of Marxists in the subject-position of the proletariat as the focal point of the critique of capitalism. ⁴² This is indeed not an easy position to give up. As Adorno puts it: “suspicion falls on anyone who combines criticism of capitalism with that of the proletariat, which is more and more becoming a mere reflection of the tendencies of capitalist development.” ⁴³ But hard as it is to give up this view, Adorno insists it is a mistake to believe that capitalist exploitation, domination and oppression is experienced as an overt social conflict and not as differential integration. He insists that the correct critical position should pay greater attention to the problem of the integrative tendency of the working class, and to the way the logic of commodification, abstraction and exploitation gets to its core as well. The critical task is to acknowledge and work through this material fact, and not to regard it as a setback that detracts from genuine proletarian class-consciousness.

Adorno further thinks that behind this misconception of ideology and of the integrative nature of late capitalism lies a misconception about the character of capitalist social domination or what he sometimes calls “unfreedom” (Unfreiheit). Capitalist domination is anonymous: it is not assignable to specific persons or groups, nor should it be perceived, as already mentioned, as a top-down binary relation of dominators versus dominated. Capitalism, writes Adorno, is “an apparatus that has escaped the control of those who use it”; “human beings continue to be subject to domination by the economic process,” and this includes even “those in charge,” who “have largely been reduced to functions of their own apparatus of production.” ⁴⁴ In this respect too, Adorno is following Marx, who emphasizes that one of the features distinguishing capitalism from earlier social formations is that it is marked by “objective dependency relations”: “Individuals are now ruled by abstractions, whereas earlier they depended on one another.” ⁴⁵

Of course, nothing about this analysis offers any quick and easy way out of the grip of ideology and differential integration. What it offers is mainly a diagnosis of symptomatic misconceptions, the overcoming of which is a necessary—even if insufficient—step in the right direction. In a Hegelian vein, Adorno argues that “freedom can only be understood… as the determinate negation of any given concrete expression of unfreedom.” ⁴⁶ If he is right, then part of the task is to overcome certain common misconceptions regarding the nature of unfreedom, social domination and the ideology that sustains them. To free ourselves from what Althusser called—a phrase Adorno might well have approved of—“the ideology of freedom.” ⁴⁷

From class consciousness to differential solidarity

We still need to address the question of who might be the potential addressee of all this. Who comes after the proletariat as an agent of social transformation, if we accept the claim that proletarian class consciousness in its “traditional” shape is impossible? If Adorno does not have some answer to this question, the whole thing might appear like a vain intellectual exercise. Here too Adorno does not offer any clear recipe, only a general outline. Instead of thinking in terms of the exploited class achieving class-consciousness, we need to think in terms of a political consciousness that would express the differentially-integrated and contradictory nature of society.

To try and shed light on this relation between contradiction and political consciousness, let us again go back to Marx. It could be argued Marx wavers between two different logics of contradiction. On the one hand, he regards the contradictions of capitalism as an active and enabling condition that “fuels” the system. On the other hand, he argues these contradictions are accumulating towards capitalism’s explosion from within. It could equally be argued that Marx exhibits a duality between a pessimistic and an optimistic prognosis: the pessimistic Marx marvels at how capitalism thrives in spite and even thanks to its own contradictions, whereas the optimistic Marx argues those contradictions spell capitalism’s eventual downfall and subsequent transformation. The following passage from the Grundrisse offers a nice illustration of this duality:

[Capitalist] production moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited. Furthermore, the universality towards which it irresistibly strives encounters barriers in its own nature, which will, at a certain stage of its development, allow it to be recognized as being itself the greatest barrier to this tendency, and hence drive through itself to its sublation [Aufhebung]. ⁴⁸

Notice yet another duality here. On the one hand, Marx writes that capitalism would “drive through itself [durch es selbst] to its sublation.” This sounds like the “good-old” deterministic Marx, who believes historical processes would take care of themselves. On the other hand, he writes that the contradictions of capitalism “allow it to be recognized [werden erkennen lassen]" as its own “greatest barrier.” This sounds more like a historical opportunity for human agents to become aware and act upon the potential for transformation opened up by capitalism’s internal contradictions.

Our suggestion is that the correct way to read Marx here—and subsequently also Adorno—is not to choose between one of the two horns of this duality, but to face this duality as describing our political condition. Capitalism is a system marked by contradictions that are both a feature that propels it and one that generates a potential for its sublation. The very success of those contradictions in maintaining capitalism opens up the opportunity that people would become conscious of that very contradictory nature of their society and try to act upon it.

Going back to Adorno, despite the pessimistic aura of his writings, he nonetheless seems to suggest in certain places that the levelling-effect of differential integration holds some potential—fragile though it might be—to make apparent and accessible to experience the contradictory nature of our social totality. For example: “the mimicking of the classless society by class society has been so successful that, while the oppressed have all been co-opted, the futility of all oppression becomes manifest.” ⁴⁹ Under the conditions of late capitalism, what should replace the orthodox notion of proletarian class consciousness is a consciousness of the oppressive nature of society that would be rooted not in the lived experience of one particular class position, but in the way this oppressiveness is shared, albeit differentially, across the various class positions.

We might refer to such consciousness of the state of differential integration as differential solidarity. Such solidarity would be neither solidarity within a given class, nor solidarity of one class towards another—say the solidarity of the powerful towards the less powerful, the privileged towards the downtrodden, the rich towards the poor, etc. It would rather be solidarity across social divides, based on the difficult realization that what stands on both sides of such divides are different-yet-related aspects of one and the same system: capitalists and proletarians, financiers and “ordinary” workers, the fully employed and the precariat, migrants and citizens, residents of “developed” versus “underdeveloped” economies. What is at stake is the critical consciousness of how all of us—even if we happen to be on the side that is “better off"—merely assume different positions on a “sliding scale” of exploitation, oppression, and ideological deceit. ⁵⁰

A recent, illuminating way of thinking about this is found in Noam Yuran’s What Money Wants, which offers a rich development of Marx’s thesis of commodity fetishism into a theory of economic desire under consumer capitalism. The point relevant to our discussion is what he has to say about potential solidarity between well-to-do Western consumers and the newly exploited producers of the global South, in the context of his analysis of how we are all immersed in the current phase of consumption that is brand economy:

A commonsensical view… [is that] the laborers in the south are impoverished because the consumers in the North thrive at their expense… [A] more correct formulation would say that the brand name impoverishes the laborers in the South by impoverishing, in a different way, the consumer in the North. ⁵¹

Yuran is well aware of the obvious objection. Surely one is better-off living as a brand-consumer in the global north than a brand-manufacturer in the global south. But the point is to realize that, despite this real difference, both sides are impoverished, exploited and unfree as a result of their involvement in the brand economy, albeit in a very different manner: one side being an unfree consumer, the other an unfree producer.

It should be acknowledged that Adorno is not providing a simple answer to what might be called the “motivational problem.” His is mainly a description of the “what” rather than the “how” of what we term here differential solidarity. Indeed, given the success Adorno assigns to social integration and to the lived experience of society as classless, why assume people would be motivated to change it? Why think they might join hands across social divides that Adorno so well demonstrates are not experienced as divides to begin with? The Marxist philosopher G. A. Cohen, for example, shares the view that there is no longer a distinct proletarian class in the form Marx thought about it. And this, he argues, raises the following problem:

How can a Boeing technician in Seattle envisage “getting together” with a laborer on an Indian tea plantation? If there is to be any form of solidarity linking such people, it needs, once again, the moral leavening which seemed so unnecessary for proletarian solidarity in the past. ⁵³

This is not a problem to which Adorno has a simple solution, although neither is it something one can say he is unaware of. There is, admittedly, something paradoxical here, and Adorno’s point seems to be that this paradoxical nature of the problem, precisely because it mirrors the nature of our society, is what we need to learn to work with, so to speak: the paradox of generating a shared-yet-differentiated consciousness of oppressiveness from within an oppressive society; a shared-yet-differentiated experience of unfreedom from within an unfree society.

If the hallmark of differential integration is that quantitative similarities between classes (consumerism, competitiveness, exploitativeness, precarity) outweigh their underlying qualitative differences (labor/capital), then differential solidarity would be the realization that we are qualitatively similar in terms of the social domination we experience. Regardless of our social position, we are unfree and impoverished by our own society even while there are considerable quantitative differences in how we experience it, what are the prices we pay for it, what hardship or relative comfort we live in, and so forth. The solidarity at stake here is the uneasy recognition of similarity-in-difference between, for example, residents of the global north versus south, consumers versus producers, workers in financial versus manufacturing jobs, intellectual versus manual laborers, etc. If differential integration is a social experience of mere quantitative differences covering over a structure of qualitative ones, differential solidarity is the corresponding recognition of qualitative similarity—unfreedom, domination, impoverishment—cutting across quantitative differences of degree.

What is at stake is the realization that the commonality of oppression across class divides does outweigh the differences in how it is expressed. Not in the abstract-universal sense of recognizing how “at the end of the day, we are all human beings,” but in the concrete-universal sense of recognizing how we all partake in differential integration and its ideological manifestations. This requires overcoming the temptation of either pitying those “at the bottom” or envying/despising those “at the top.” It would call for political organization based neither on simple commonality or sympathy, but on somehow bringing to consciousness the way differential integration operates on all of us, and how we all partake in its ideological sustaining. This is not something Adorno argues would happen of necessity, but is a matter of realizing a potential. Nor does he seem to deny the weight of those social factors that he himself analyzes and that run counter to this potential. Adorno writes that the task of critical theory is “to think the totality in its untruth.” ⁵⁴ How we turn our understanding of the inherently contradictory nature of social totality into a basis for shared political consciousness is admittedly an open question. For Adorno, this relentless critical awareness is at least a necessary step towards “breaking the spell” of this reality. ⁵⁵