DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.

12341

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

“Society maintains itself despite all the

catastrophes that may eventuate”: Critical theory,
negative totality, and crisis
Chris O'Kane

City University of New York, New York, NY, USA

Correspondence
Chris O'Kane, Department of Economics, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, 524 West 59th Street,
New York, NY 10019, USA.
Email: theresonlyonechrisokane@gmail.com

1 INTRODUCTION

The 2008 global financial crisis led to the outbreak of the Great Recession, waves of bailouts, austerity, and protest. As
Albena Azmanova, (2014), Amy Kim (2014), and Anita Chari (2015) have shown this tumultuous sequence of events
undermined the efficacy of the prevailing approaches to critical theory. For, as they demonstrate, despite their differ-
ences, the communicative and recognition theoretical approaches of Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth inadequately
integrated the critique of political economy into their critical theories of society and these authors were thus unable to
provide an adequate critical theory of contemporary society in light of the 2008 crisis.1
Kim and Chari, in turn, showed how the critique of political economy should be integrated into contemporary critical
theory.2 Kim's neo-classical Marxist approach held that capitalism was in the midst of a structural crisis “against which
once effective stabilizing measures seem ever more helpless” (Kim, 2014, p. 377). Critical theory should accordingly
draw on Robert Brenner's (2006, 2009) and Gopal Balakrishnan's (2009) formulations of secular crisis to articulate a
traditional Marxist3 emancipatory theory of crisis;4 because an “adequate Marxist critical theory needs to be able to
articulate capitalism's structural limits and tendencies to crisis” in order to “gauge the historically specific possibilities
of emancipation” (Kim, 2014, p. 377). Chari argued that a neo-Lukácsian notion of subjectivity and collective political
agency which unites the critique of political economy with radical democracy, could de-reify and politicize subjectivities
rendered passive by neoliberalism. This would aid the emancipatory movements for a reconfiguration of neoliberal
political and economic relations that had arisen in response to the crisis, exemplified in Occupy.
Unfortunately, these approaches have proven themselves inadequate to our current moment, despite the important
points they raise. For the emancipatory potential of the crisis that Kim and Chari identified has been eclipsed, not only
by a weak and miserable recovery, but also by the ebbing of emancipatory movements and the ensuing rise of right-
wing authoritarian populism; an outcome that was not anticipated and not grasped as an immanent possibility by their
traditional neo-classical Marxist or neo-Lukáscian frameworks.
Thus, despite the fact that these two authors justify their respective formulations of the relationship between crit-
ical theory and the critique of political economy by referring to the early critical theory of Horkheimer and Adorno,
the very models they formulate are ill-equipped to address the issues that concerned Adorno's critical theory of neg-
ative totality elucidated in the Introduction to The Positivist Dispute, “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?,” and other
related works: namely, the relationship between capitalism's crisis-prone dynamic of accumulation, the regressive and

Constellations. 2018;1–15. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cons 

c 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 1
2 O'KANE

counteracting tendencies likewise inherent to the process of social reproduction, and the specter of the rise of author-
itarianism in democratic societies, particularly in moments of crisis.5 This is no doubt due to one of the shibboleths
prevalent in the Anglophone literature on Adorno (to which Kim and Chari refer): that Dialectic of Enlightenment marked
the point when Adorno discarded the Marxian foundation of his critical theory of society for a pessimistic theory of
instrumental reason in which a totally administered late capitalist society had overcome capitalism's crisis tendencies.
This line of interpretation leads Chari6 and Kim7 to the conclusion that, at the very least, Adorno would have little to
say about the 2008 economic crisis, or to the stronger claim that his account of stability and integration is anachronistic
in the present time.
This leads me, in what follows, to read Adorno against the grain of this dominant interpretation from our present
standpoint. In the first half of the article, I argue, in contrast to the former, that Adorno's interpretation of the law of
value and his modification of the law of crisis are integral to his critical theory of negative totality. Moreover, as I further
demonstrate, this modified notion of crisis provides an account of class-consciousness and capital's limits and crisis dis-
tinct from traditional Marxist theory of emancipatory crisis (in its classical, Lukácsian, and contemporary variants). For,
as I show, the concept of negative totality elucidates the crisis-prone subjective-objective process of the reproduction
of society, the counteracting modifications and the maiming of subjectivity likewise integral to this process, together
with the ensuing prospect of authoritarianism arising from within democratic societies, particularly in moments of cri-
sis. In so doing, I demonstrate the link between Adorno's reading of the critique of political economy and his critical
theory of negative totality, raising the further question of its possible suitability in our time, which the second half of
the article deals with.
Here, in contrast to dominant interpretations of its current unsuitability, I reconfigure my reconstruction of negative
totality to provide an account of the emergence of neoliberalism, the 2008 crisis, its miserable aftermath, and the rise
of right-wing authoritarian populism. Drawing on Simon Clarke, John Abromeit, David McNally, Paul Mattick, Jr., Nick
Dyer-Witherford, and Greig Charnock, Thomas Purcell, Ramon Ribera Fumaz, I argue that Adorno's account of nega-
tive totality can be modified to reflect the reconfiguration of state and economic policy along neoliberal lines, which
revived profits even as it unintentionally culminated in a trajectory of crisis-prone immiseration, financialization, and
debt, realized in the 2008 crisis. Moreover, I further argue that the aftermath of the crisis also mirrors Adorno's notion
of counteracting modifications and regression. Weak profit rates were restored by heightened neoliberalism, austerity
and further misery. The initial progressive, or even emancipatory response to the crisis, was soon eclipsed by the rise of
neoliberal authoritarian populism, which promised to restore the system: remedying the unjust ills of the hardworking
“producers” left behind by neoliberalism and its crises at the expense of the scapegoated “parasites” held responsi-
ble for such malaise. I conclude by pointing to the relevance such a reconfigured Adornian critical theory of negative
totality holds for critical theory today.

2 THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE CRITICAL THEORY

OF SOCIETY

Anita Chari provides a useful account of the prevalent conception of Adorno's relationship to the critique of political
economy. Summarizing what she correctly calls the “familiar history of critical theory,”8 Chari claims that Adorno's
work in the 1940s was produced under the influence of

Friedrich Pollock's state capitalism thesis, which diagnosed a new phase of capitalism where state intervention
and the primacy of the political over the economic had effectively absorbed the immanent contradictions that
were previously present in the liberal phase of capitalism. (Chari, 2015, p. 72)

Therefore, as Chari further states, Dialectic of Enlightenment, marks the point where Adorno's “critique of reification is
detached from its basis in the Marxian analysis of the historically specific commodity form and instead is deployed in
the service of a critique of reason as such, which is now identified with instrumental rationality” (p. 72). From this it fol-
lows that Adorno's late work is said to have treated “the capitalist social form” as “a species of identity thinking” (p. 73).
O'KANE 3

There is certainly some evidence to support this interpretation.9 Comments in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, cou-
pled with the noted absence of Marxian crisis theory, can be seen as drawing on Pollock's analysis.10 Moreover, as
Adorno's work on the culture industry and administration attests, his critical theory of mid-20th-century capitalist
society certainly consisted in criticizing the state management of the economy, culture, and the integration of classes
into mass society. Finally, Adorno's equivocal comments about “proto-comical” immiseration, Marx's theory of final cri-
sis, and “the direction of economic processes … passing into the hands of political power,” in “Late Capitalism or Industrial
Society?” (Adorno, 1968) can be read as following Pollock's analysis nearly 30 years later.
Yet there is also a strand of Adorno's work that cuts against this interpretation. As James Schmidt (2016),11
Deborah Cook (1998) and Adorno himself in “Reflections on Class Theory” point out, Adorno never agreed with
Pollock's contention that capitalism's crisis tendencies had been overcome.12 Moreover, as Hans-Georg Backhaus
(1992, 1997) and Werner Bonefeld (2014, 2016) have shown, Adorno developed an interpretation of the critique of
political economy in the 1960s that was distinct from traditional Marxism, and was central to his critical theory of
this era.
Indeed, as I will now argue, in contrast to the predominant reception, the critical theory of negative totality Adorno
provided in the two key texts under consideration centers on his reading of Marx's theory of value, where it is referred
to as exchange, and the law of exchange, as well as “the law of value, the law of accumulation, the law of crisis.” Yet
in contrast to Marx and to traditional Marxism's emancipatory theory of crisis (in its classical, Lukácsian and contem-
porary forms)—which holds that a final crisis will arise from the process of accumulation when a protracted period of
immiseration is realized in a cataclysmic crisis that awakens class consciousness leading to the proletariat's seizure of
the totality they have collectively created—as a whole, Adorno conceives of Marx's theory of value as a negative supra-
individual “phenomenology of the anti-spirit” (Adorno, 1990, p. 356) a “conceptuality which holds sway in reality itself”
(Adorno, 1981, p. 80) that accounts for the social constitution, autonomization, personification, and antagonism that
characterizes the socially objective, supra-individual, crisis-prone subjective-objective dynamic of the reproduction of
the negative totality of capitalist society.13 Thus, rather than leading to the revolutionary overcoming of capitalism, by
virtue of this very negative subjective-objective social dynamic, totality possesses internal tendencies that have coun-
teracted cataclysmic crises and maimed the individuals who perpetuate it, leading them to become reliant on and to
identify with the very same crisis-ridden dynamic of accumulation that dominates them. This maiming of subjectivity,
in turn, leads to the cultivation of authoritarian personalities and the potential rise of authoritarian governance from
within democratic societies, especially following the outbreak of crises.14

2.1 Introduction to the positivist dispute

The contours of this theory of negative totality and its relationship with Adorno's interpretation of the critique of polit-
ical economy, are distilled in his Introduction to The Positivist Dispute. Written in 1968 alongside “Late Capitalism or
Industrial Society?,” the Introduction crystallizes nearly a decade's worth of his writing on the relationship between
the critique of political economy and Adorno's critical theory of negative totality.15 It also establishes the relationship
between the former and the latter in connection with Adorno's modification of his interpretation of Marx's emancipa-
tory theory of crisis, social regression, and authoritarianism within the context of what Adorno seems to have perceived
as a looming crisis, to which I now turn.

2.2 Society as subject, society as object

Adorno defines negative totality as encompassing the dynamic interplay of “society as subject and society as object.”
On the one hand, as Adorno states, society is “subjective because it refers back to the human beings who create it”
(Adorno, 1981, p. 33). On the other hand, “Society is objective because, on account of its underlying structure, it cannot
perceive its own subjectivity, because it does not possess a total subject and through its organization it thwarts the
installation of such a subject” (Adorno, 1981, p. 33).
4 O'KANE

2.3 Exchange
In order to articulate the constitution and reproduction of this conception of society, Adorno explicates his interpre-
tation of the critique of political economy. Society's underlying structure is created by the aggregate activity of pro-
duction for profit carried out by individuals within the capitalist social division of labor who collectively create the
emergent phenomena of the exchange abstraction. Accordingly, this abstraction possesses socially objective and supra-
individual properties, compelling through inversion the very acts of the subjects who create it. As Adorno states, since
“society is a system in the sense of a synthesis of an atomized plurality” the “shabby permanency in the constitution of
society itself” is “the universal development of the exchange system” which “largely endows the system with a mechani-
cal character.” Consequently, “totality is pre-established for all individual subjects” leading them to “obey its ‘contrainte’
even in themselves and even in their monadological constitution.”16 Negative totality is thus constituted and repro-
duced by means of such a subjective-objective dynamic (Adorno, 1981, p. 38).

2.4 Accumulation and crisis

Moreover, Adorno further characterizes this process of reproduction on the basis of his understanding of Marx's the-
ories of accumulation and crisis. Following from above, the “objective rationality of society, namely that of exchange”
(Adorno, 1981, p. 15) requires “everyone to respect the law of exchange if he does not wish to be destroyed, irrespec-
tive of whether profit is his subjective motivation or not” (Adorno, 1981, p. 13). This objective coercive reality thus
“reduc[es] everyone into agents and bearers of commodity exchange.” More specifically, as Adorno claims elsewhere,
workers are compelled to sell their labor power in order to survive, while capitalists are compelled to accumulate cap-
ital and thus exploit workers in order to prevent themselves from going broke (Adorno, forthcoming). Consequently,
further drawing on his reading of Marx, Adorno says that this antagonism unfolds in a contradictory manner, leading
to crises. For this “context which perpetuates life simultaneously destroys it” due to “the lethal impulse towards which
its dynamic is propelled” (Adorno, 1981, p. 38): “developmental tendencies within society … leading to concentration,
over-accumulation and crisis” (Adorno, 1981, p. 40).
To see why, let us turn to Adorno's more in-depth explication of this process in his 1962 lecture on Marx:17

Essence of dialectics: Capitalists are forced to try to accumulate surplus value. For this purpose, they are impelled
to develop machines in order to replace living with dead labor. If not, then they are in competition. Here, a
moment of the sphere of circulation impacts on the sphere of production. However, because they are forced,
capitalists create the conditions of productive forces that do not need the chains of capitalist economy. Second,
they thereby create a dynamic which turns against themselves; more and more labor is set free, thereby creating
the conditions of crisis and the continuously increasing threat to the system itself. In order to maintain itself, the
system must produce precisely such moments through which it increasingly undermines (untergräbt) its own
possibility. (Adorno, forthcoming)

Certainly, these comments elude important technical distinctions in Marx's work. Nonetheless, they suggest that it is
possible to unpack how Adorno utilizes his interpretation of the critique of political economy to adumbrate the crisis-
prone reproduction of negative totality as follows: capitalist social totality constitutes and reproduces itself through
antagonistic exchange relations (society as subject and object). Social reproduction is thus inextricably tied to the accu-
mulation of capital wherein the supra-individual objective process of valorization compels the subjective action of capi-
talists to generate profit by mechanizing production and rationalizing exploitation. This process unfolds in an internally
contradictory historical dynamic where investment in production technology is coupled with a declining investment
in the labor force, leading to lower wages, higher unemployment, and immiseration. This leads, in turn, to over-
accumulation, a fall in effective demand, stagnation, a falling rate of profit, and eventually a crisis of reproduction.18

2.5 Modifications and derivations

My reconstruction indicates, contra the dominant interpretation of Adorno's late critical theory, that the critique of
political economy is thus of central importance to this critical theory of negative totality. Indeed, as Adorno also states,
O'KANE 5

in further contrast to this interpretation, “Whether or not capitalist society will be impelled towards its collapse, as
Marx asserted … is one of the most important questions with which the social sciences ought to concern themselves”
(Adorno, 1981, p. 42). However, Adorno's answer to this question distinguishes him from Marx and the traditional
Marxist emancipatory theory of crisis, while also further going against the dominant interpretation of his later criti-
cal theory. For, as he states in regard to the importance of the exchange abstraction for critical theory, the model of a
dialectical concept of a general law of social reproduction
would be Marx's law of crisis—even if it has become so obscured as to be unrecognizable—which was deduced
from the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Its modifications, for their part, should also be derived from it. The
efforts to ward off or postpone the system immanent tendency are already prescribed within the system. (Adorno,
1981, p. 37)
Consequently, this very conception of derivation and modification leads Adorno to discuss two important develop-
ments, which he indicates have issued from the process of accumulation, but nevertheless prevented the final crisis, if
not capitalism's crisis-prone tendencies. The first consists in the bureaucratic form of illiberal society, which represses
individuals (and, as we will see in the next section, counteracts overaccumulation). The second is Adorno's account of
the maiming and regression of subjectivity by the dominating subjective-objective dynamic of reproduction discussed
above.
In this purview, since society, “is just as much founded” in the subject “as it comprehends and constitutes them”
(p. 42), the reduction of individuals to character masks, following the imperative of self-preservation, is reflected in
the formation of maimed subjectivity. Hence “The society based on domination has not simply robbed itself and human
beings—its compulsory members—of dignity, but rather it has never permitted them to become … emancipated beings”
(p. 42). Instead, the overwhelming majority of individuals not only “tolerate relations of domination” but “identify them-
selves with them and are motivated towards irrational attitudes by them” (p. 47). Consequently, their “real impotence”
and reliance on the system is “consciously realized in an authoritarian mental attitude” (p. 58).

2.6 Authoritarianism
Therefore, as Adorno discussed in more depth elsewhere,19 the maiming of subjectivity and the formation of author-
itarian personalities, as part and parcel of this subjective-objective dynamic, raised the possibility of authoritarianism
arising within democratic societies. This was especially true in times of crisis. According to Adorno, since individuals
with weak egos and authoritarian personalities, rather than strong egos and autonomy, identified with totality in times
of prosperity, they would be prone to reinforce it in moments of crisis. Hence, following the outbreak of a cataclysmic
crisis, rather than coming to consciousness, identifying capitalist totality as the force responsible for domination, mis-
ery, and crises, and participating in its revolutionary seizure, those individuals with authoritarian personalities support
strong leaders who promise to reinforce the system and counteract crises by instituting authoritarian economic and
social policies that will restore profitability and the “unfairly” affected livelihoods of their hard-working supporters
while punishing the marginalized minorities held responsible for the former, thus perpetuating a dynamic that contin-
ues to maim its supporters.
In sum, the Introduction to The Positivist Dispute demonstrates the central role Adorno's interpretation of the cri-
tique of political economy plays in the formulation of his theory of negative totality. For here, in contrast to the pre-
vailing interpretation of his late critical theory, Adorno's modification of the former provides his account of the repro-
duction of the latter. However, since the delineation of this relationship leaves something to be desired, particularly in
regard to the relationship between crises, counteracting modifications and negative totality, I now turn to unpacking it
by focusing on “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?.”

3 LATE CAPITALISM AND INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY

As I will now show, Adorno adumbrates the relationship between late capitalism and industrial society from the per-
spective of how the historical developments characterizing mid-20th-century capitalist society had arisen from the
6 O'KANE

process of accumulation: modifying and counteracting (but not overcoming) capitalism's dynamic of dominating, antag-
onistic, and crisis-prone reproduction. This means that, enumerating his comments in the Introduction to The Positivist
Dispute, the state management of the economy is not said to have overcome the law of crisis but to have derived from
it, acting as a “system immanent means of self-defense” (Adorno, 1968) to secure the persistence of capitalist accumu-
lation by assuring a high level of effective demand and stability. Therefore, while these transformations lead Adorno
to offer some equivocal comments about the objectivity of the law of value, in regard to acknowledging that Marx's
theory of the final crisis had not come to pass, he nevertheless utilizes his interpretation of the critique of political
economy to account for the modified reproduction of negative totality. In so doing, substantiating my reconstruction
of the subjective objective dimensions of late capitalism and industrial society, wherein counteracting tendencies and
proto-comical immiseration had culminated in the maiming of subjectivity and the potential rise of authoritarianism.

3.1 Negative totality, late capitalism, industrial society

This is first evident in Adorno's affirmation of the important connections between his reading of the critique of polit-
ical economy and his critical theory of society.20 Echoing his comments in the Introduction to The Positivist Dispute,
Adorno states that the law of crisis had not realized itself in mid-20th-century western capitalist societies. Although
Adorno points out that the unprecedented technological development of production had led to increased productivity,
he argues this development was realized in the widespread possession of cheap consumer goods rather than immiser-
ation. Thus “prognoses of class-theory such as immiseration and economic crisis” (seen in the Marxian and traditional
Marxist notion of the final crisis) had “not been so drastically realized” (Adorno, 1968). Rather, capitalism had “dis-
covered resources within itself, which have permitted the postponing of economic collapse” so that one can speak of
relative immiseration only in a “comical sense” (Adorno, 1968).
While Adorno acknowledges that these developments raise the prospect that it is “conceivable that contemporary
society cannot be contained within a coherent theory” (Adorno, 1968), he goes on to elucidate these very same devel-
opments by drawing on the interpretation of the critique of political economy I have reconstructed above. From this it
follows that Adorno characterizes late capitalist economy and industrial society as elements of the objective-subjective
exchange mediated reproduction of negative capitalist totality. For the “the all-penetrating ether of society” consists in
“the exchange-relationships, the objective abstractions, which belongs to the social life-process” of valorization. Hence
“The economic process continues to perpetuate domination over human beings” because “[p]roduction goes on today
just as it did before, for the sake of profits.” Consequently, on the objective level:

Society has developed itself into a [negative] totality due to the fact that modes of procedure, which resemble the
industrial ones, are extending by economic necessity into the realms of material production, into administration,
the distribution-sphere and that which we call culture. (Adorno, 1968)

Therefore, on the subjective level, the power of the exchange “abstraction over humanity is far more corporeal than
that of any single institution, which silently constitutes itself in advance according to the scheme of things and beats
itself into human beings” (Adorno, 1968) so that “The objects of such are no longer merely the masses, but also the
administrators and their hangers-on” (Adorno, 1968).

3.2 Accumulation, crises, and counteracting modifications

As this indicates, Adorno holds that the transformations in mid-20th-century industrial society—amounting to Fordist
mass production and the “Keynesian” state management of the economy—derive from and modify the process of
valorization and reproduction by keeping production and consumption at an equilibrium, leading to stability and
integration, counteracting immiseration and crises. For, as Adorno goes on to state, “the resources that capitalism had
discovered to postpone economic collapse” were numerous and primarily consisted of what he terms industrial society.
Chief among these were the large labor force required by Fordist models of mass production coupled with the state's
management of the economy, which acted as what he called “the system-immanent embodiment of self-defense”
O'KANE 7

against crises by assuring an adequate level of effective demand. As Adorno indicates, the Fordist model of mass
production thus assured unprecedented levels of mass employment and high wages. Moreover, the state management
of the economy not only consisted of the welfare state, policies of full employment, and price fixing, but also the
military Keynesianism of the Cold War, which helped maintain the relations of production without “the apocalyptic
earthquake of renewed economic crises” by assuring that an inordinate and unsaleable share of the social product not
met by the aforementioned welfare policies was dedicated to “the production of the means of destruction” (Adorno,
1968). Finally, Adorno states that exploitative international relations between the industrial nations and developing
countries were a displaced political realization of class struggle.
As noted above, Adorno holds that these aspects of industrial society were realized in a number of developments
that counteracted capitalism's crisis tendencies. The mass production of consumer goods coupled with full employment
and high wages not only assured that overaccumulation and weak demand did not come into contradiction with each
other, but also that they led to a rise in living standards rather than the immiseration of western proletarians.
Yet, as we have seen, industrial society is not the antidote to the law of value but, as a “system immanent means of
self-defense” against its crisis tendencies, is integral to its modified dynamic of valorization and reproduction, this also
means that

[i]f the theory of immiseration was not borne out of à la lettre [to the letter], then it certainly has in the no less
frightening sense, that unfreedom, one's dependence on the consciousness of those who serve an uncontrollable
apparatus, is spreading universally over humanity … like in mythology, it confronts them as fate [Schicksal].
(Adorno, 1968)21

From this it follows that, mirroring the account above, revolutionary class-consciousness had not arisen. Instead in
adapting “themselves to the constitution of the machines which they serve” individuals have been “compelled to
assume the roles of the social mechanism and to model themselves on such, without reservation, on the level of their
most intimate impulses.” Consequently, individuals “are as little as ever autonomous masters of their lives.” Rather, the
maiming of subjectivity inherent to this subjective-objective dynamic means “the kernel of individuation is beginning
to come apart,” as is “the rationality of the fixed, identical ego.” This leads to the formation of the “authoritarian men-
tal attitude” and the possibility of authoritarianism arising from within democratic societies discussed above, in which
“[s]ubjective regression favors once again the regression of the system” (Adorno, 1968).
Adorno's “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?” can thus be seen to elucidate the relationship between the critique
of political economy and his critical theory of negative totality, which was reconstructed above. The exchange abstrac-
tion is central to Adorno's subjective-objective account of reproduction in the negative totality of late capitalist society,
encompassing the economy, the state, and culture. Moreover, Adorno does not claim that capitalism's crisis tendencies
have been overcome. Rather, by reading his account of industrial society in light of his comments in The Positivist Dis-
pute, we can see these developments as modifications that derived from the crisis-prone process of accumulation as
counteracting tendencies that prevented an internal contradiction in the historical trajectory of capital accumulation
between unprecedented technological development, immiseration, the falling rate of profit, and crisis. Thus, rather
than the final crisis, or the overcoming of crisis-tendencies, the persistence of the crisis-prone dynamic of capitalist
accumulation led to transformations in the process of reproduction that amounted to Keynesian policies, integration,
the maiming of subjectivity, and the prospective rise of authoritarianism.
From this perspective, it can be said that, in contrast to the dominant interpretation, Adorno's formulation of neg-
ative totality did not abandon Marx's critique of political economy, but rather utilized an interpretation of it to explain
the very modifications in the process of reproduction that had modified it.

4 RECONFIGURING NEGATIVE TOTALITY

This raises the possibility that this formulation of Adorno's critical theory of negative totality might also be pertinent
to our contemporary moment. However, in order for this to be the case one would have to show that Adorno's theory
8 O'KANE

is compatible with the transformations that distinguish the present moment from mid-20th-century capitalist society
and then reconfigure negative totality in light of these transformations.
Luckily, this is not as formidable as it sounds. In the first place, it should be noted that Adorno also stated in the
introduction to The Positivist Dispute that it “is by no means certain that” that the “efforts” detailed in “Late Capitalism”
“to ward off or postpone the system immanent tendency” to crisis, efforts which “are already prescribed within the
system,” are “possible indefinitely,” nor is it certain “whether such efforts enact the law of crisis against their own will”
(Adorno, 1981, p. 37). At this point in 1968, he even went so far as to suggest that “writing on the wall suggests a slow
inflationary collapse” (Adorno, 1981, p. 37).
Moreover, by drawing on Simon Clarke (1988, 2001), Paul Mattick, Jr. (2011), David McNally (2011), Nick Dyer-
Witherford (2015), Greig Charnock, Thomas Purcell and Ramon Ribera Fumaz (2014), and John Abromeit (2016), my
overview of the historical trajectory of accumulation between Adorno's remarks in 1968 and the present shows that
Adorno can be said to have anticipated the crisis that marked the eclipse of capitalism's golden age in the early 1970s.
More importantly, it also makes the case that my reconstruction of Adorno's critical theory of negative totality can
be reconfigured to provide an account of the ensuing emergence of neoliberalism, its trajectory of accumulation up to
and including 2008 crisis, and its aftermath, insofar as these transformations can be shown to derive internally from
the Adornian conception of the crisis-ridden dynamic of capitalist accumulation, internal counteraction, and social
regression.
In so doing, the following interpretation thus goes against Kim and Chari's interpretations of Adorno's critical theory
of late capitalist society, challenging their conclusions that Adorno's late critical theory is not an appropriate basis for
a critical theory of our current crisis-ridden era. Moreover, in light of the blind spots in Kim's and Chari's approaches, it
also sets up my conclusion on the relevance that the Adornian connection between critical theory and the critique of
political economy has for a contemporary critical theory that addresses these issues.

4.1 The end of the golden age

As I will now show, Adorno's suggestive comments in 1968 were perceptive insofar as the very technological develop-
ments he discussed in “Late Capitalism” led to overaccumulation and the inflation he indicated, laying the groundwork
for an economic slowdown in the early 1970s, which, following ineffective government intervention, enacted the “crisis
against their own will” that marked the end of the “Keynesian” golden age. As Paul Mattick, Jr. states:

despite the panoply of governmental interventions and “automatic stabilizers” set in place to keep the economy
on an even keel” the golden age of capitalism “came to an end… . World growth slowed dramatically, with declin-
ing rates of investment and productivity and increasing unemployment. (Mattick, 2011, p. 56)

In line with Adorno's interpretation of crisis-prone accumulation, “Once again a boom, with its attendant increase, rel-
ative to labor, in capital invested in means of production had led to declining profits and so to an end of prosperity”
(Mattick, 2011, p. 56). This culminated, as Clarke points out, in the classic overaccumulation crisis that marked the end
of Keynesianism (Clarke, 2001, p. 86).

4.2 Neoliberalism and the 2008 crisis

The ensuing efforts to revive the global economy meant that late capitalism's counteracting modifications—technology,
state intervention, and relations between the global North and South—took on new roles in the process of val-
orization and the ensuing trajectory of accumulation. Yet while these roles were qualitatively different from that in
Adorno's account of late capitalism, they were still in line with my reconstruction of Adorno's critical theory of negative
totality insofar as they were derived from this process of capitalist reproduction, counteracting and then unintention-
ally producing crises only in a newly modified form. In other words, these neoliberal modifications much like their
Keynesian forefathers, were indeed efforts that derived from the system, warding off and postponing the system-
immanent tendency to crisis until they culminated in another crisis against their own will.
O'KANE 9

This is because the transformation from Keynesianism to neoliberalism marked “the turn to a more virulent form
of capitalism, which would result in a new wave of expansion—albeit with a growth pattern based on soaring social
inequality, rising global poverty, and increased human insecurity” (McNally, 2011, p. 26), leading to a pronounced
reliance on financialization and debt, and a cycle of bubbles and busts that culminating in the 2008 crisis.
The neoliberal effort to revive profits consisted in a state-led attack on unions coupled with the introduction of
lean production technology in the global North, outsourcing, and waves of primitive accumulation in Asia. This led to
declining wages, the emergence of surplus populations in formerly industrialized countries, the generation of waves
of profits, and the subsequent rapid and pronounced polarization of wealth. Finally, these strategies of rationalizing
production and exploitation were combined with the state-administered devastation wrought by the very tools of eco-
nomic state management Adorno pointed to: privatization, the rolling back of welfare provisions, and the regressive
restructuring of tax laws (see Clarke, 2001; McNally, 2011, pp. 40–50).
These policies were able to revive profits, but they also led to the unintended consequence of the increased impor-
tance of debt for insuring accumulation and social reproduction. In lieu of falling wages and the gutting of the welfare
state, debt enabled workers in the global North to reproduce themselves. The lack of demand (in part due to the very
eroding purchasing power of proletarians) led companies to take on speculative means of achieving profits, such as
takeovers and mergers, resulting in businesses accruing their own debt (see Charnock et al., 2014, pp. 31–32, Clarke,
2001, McNally, 2011, chapters 4 and 5).
Accumulation from the 1980s onward was marked by these realities. Globalization was driven by sectors more
or less tied directly to outsourcing and short-term speculation, leading to further waves of primitive accumulation,
debt, and default in the global South. At the same time, in the global North, “governments, businesses and, to an ever-
increasing degree, individuals used borrowed funds to purchase goods and services” (Mattick, 2011, p. 64). Conse-
quently, as Clarke notes, “the renewed global boom in the accumulation of productive capital was overlain by an even
greater boom in speculative investment channeled through the world's financial institutions” (Clarke, 2001, p. 89),
where, as Mattick succinctly puts it, “public, corporate and household debt appeared on bank and other business bal-
ance sheets as profits” (Mattick, 2011, p. 64).
This meant that, instead of the contradiction between overaccumulation and demand coming to a head in a crisis,
it was counteracted and kicked further down the road, even as the imbalance accrued. A full-scale global crisis was
avoided in the 1990s by speculative investments in dotcom companies, the rapid state-backed development of finan-
cialization, and the further accrual of debt, which created a new bubble that revived profits until the mid-2000s (see
McNally, 2011, Chapter 4 for a historical account of the rise of finance). However, “[l]ike all such speculative booms,
it could only be sustained by the constant influx of new investments and discovery of new outlets for the expanded
capital” (Clarke, 2011, p. 90) and this led to the increasing reliance on financialization, particularly on objectively risky
lending practices such as subprime mortgage-backed securities and derivatives.22 When the former could not be paid
off—due to the decline in wages and the rise in surplus populations in the global North as result of the developments
assayed above—a crisis was triggered that soon spread from the financial institutions tied to these loans to the global
economy, states, and civil society.23

4.3 The aftermath

The aftermath of the financial crisis further exemplified such a dynamic, realizing itself in a wider crisis of reproduc-
tion. The transformation of bank debt into public debt led to waves of austerity and suffering. They were engendered
by cuts in welfare, health care, education, pensions, and public-sector jobs for large sectors of western societies. This,
in turn, led to the further rise of surplus populations, the emergence of graduates with no future and structural under-
employment, the persistence of declining wages, and increased indebtedness in the global North as well as rising food
prices and further immiseration in the global South (see Mason, 2012, for a discussion of austerity and the progressive
protests following 2008).
Such a cataclysmic crisis led to contentions that Marx (and maybe even socialism itself) was back. Indeed, the erosion
of the material conditions of so many and the wave of progressive populist anti-austerity movements in the west in the
10 O'KANE

wake of the 2008 (such as Occupy) lent these analyses credibility. These very same developments informed Kim's call
for contemporary critical theory to criticize capitalism's limits from the perspective of a traditional Marxist analysis of
secular, and perhaps even emancipatory, crisis. This was likewise the case for Chari's reformulation of Lukácsian de-
reification, the coming to consciousness of radical political subjectivity, and the reconfiguration of neoliberal political
and economic relations, which to some extent might be said to have been mirrored in the ensuing electoral programs
of Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of Labour in the UK, and the surprising
popularity of the Bernie Sanders campaign in the USA.
Yet the class-in-itself never became the class-for-itself; anemic profits were restored by exacerbating inequality
and misery through neoliberalism on steroids rather than radical democratic process of reform, and these progressive
movements were all too soon eclipsed by the rise of regressive right-wing populist and authoritarian movements, such
as the Tea Party, UKIP, and the Five Star Movement.24
Here, as Adorno anticipated, it does indeed seem to be the case that the maiming of individual subjectivity he
analyzed as inherent to the dynamic of reproduction fostered reliance on the very processes that maimed it; hence
the flowering of right-wing populist movements that advocated reinforcing the former, in its neoliberal form, while
holding marginalized scapegoats to account for its miseries. As John Abromeit has shown, the discontent expressed
in the emergence of right-wing authoritarian populist movements mirrored Adorno's notion of pseudo-conservatism
and its rhetoric of “producers and parasites” (Abromeit, 2016). Foreign governments, foreigners, women, and people
of color and other supposedly “unproductive” and “parasitic” members of society were portrayed as being respon-
sible for the pronounced inequality and social misery inflicted on “producers” by the waves of neoliberal automa-
tion, outsourcing, restructuring, and privatization assayed above that had culminated in the crisis as well as an
economic recovery that failed to address these grievances (see Drum, 2017). This led a significant number of “pro-
ducers” left behind by these developments to support strong leaders who promised to restore prosperity; recti-
fying the broken system by getting better deals that would return jobs and restore livelihoods to the productive
members of society, while punishing the “parasites.” The Brexit and Trump victories marked their breakthrough in
the G8.25
As things stand in the summer of 2017, nearly 10 years after the crisis, the economy has recovered, yet crisis-ridden
misery persists. Inequality (see, for instance, Alvaredo, Chancel, Piketty, Saez, & Zucman, 2017 and Casselman &
Flowers, 2014) and the number of workers displaced by the permanent elimination of jobs has risen (see Rojanasakul
& Coy, 2017; Yglesias, 2016); debt has returned to or exceeded pre-2008 levels (see Chang, 2017; Corkey & Cowley,
2017).26 In the USA the authoritarian neoliberalism of the Trump administration promises to restore prosperity to
“productive” Americans, and further stigmatize and punish those scapegoats blamed for the loss of manufacturing
jobs and rising inequality, while their vaunted stimulus and infrastructure programs look to issue in more tax cuts,
more automation, and a sprinkling of low-paid contingent jobs, which, in the name of reviving American prosperity,
may in fact trigger another recession or even crisis. Moreover, the rule of right-wing authoritarian populist parties in
Poland, Hungary, and Turkey, as well as their ascendance in France, Holland, Slovakia, and Austria, and the cooptation
of their rhetoric by the Tory party in conjunction with the persistence of neoliberal economic policies, often justified
on the basis of populist rhetoric and further scapegoating, suggests that this dynamic will be replicated throughout
much of the global North. Despite the unprecedented surge in support for Corbyn's social democratic platform, and
Melanchon's surprising showing in the French election, this results in a rather grim diagnosis and the distinct possibility
that things might get worse.

5 TOWARDS A CRITICAL THEORY OF THE NEGATIVE TOTALITY

OF CONTEMPORARY CAPITALIST SOCIETY

It is my contention that the prospects of such a grim conjuncture points to the suitability of this reconfigured notion of
negative totality for a critical theory of contemporary capitalist society and with it the Adornian notion of the relation-
ship between critical theory and the critique of political economy, as I have presented it here.
O'KANE 11

For not only have Kim and Chari's formulations proven inadequate for understanding the ensuing historical trajec-
tory that followed the 2008 crisis and into the present, but this in turn calls into question the validity of the theoretical
premises of their attempts to reunite contemporary critical theory with the critique of political economy. The tradi-
tional Marxian notion of a secular crisis on which Kim draws seems to have been refuted by our weak recovery and its
fallout, thus calling into question the usefulness of such a notion of the crisis dynamics and limits of capitalism to con-
temporary critical theory, and by extension, it questions the notion of a final crisis. In addition, Chari's neo-Lukáscian
notion of reified consciousness giving way to political agency in the wake of the 2008 crisis occludes the possibility that
some types of politicized subjectivity may very well be conditioned to reinforce the dominating structures that oppress
it. This likewise raises the question of the relevance of this neo-Lukácsian notion of reified consciousness, political sub-
jectivity (and with it the underlying thesis of the coming to consciousness of the proletariat following the outbreak of a
crisis) to a critical theory of the present time.27
In contrast, such a diagnosis signifies the importance of reuniting contemporary critical theory and the critique of
political economy on the basis of a reconfigured notion of negative totality. For, as I have shown, in contrast to the
popular conception that he abandoned the critique of political economy following the Dialectic of Enlightenment, not
only the law of value but his modification of the law of crisis can be seen to have been essential aspects of Adorno's
critical theory of negative totality. Yet, as I have also shown, such a notion of crisis has an account of capital's limits,
the coming to consciousness of the proletariat, and thus the fallout of cataclysmic crises that is markedly different
from the view of traditional Marxists. Adorno's notion of negative totality accounts for the crisis-prone subjective-
objective process of reproduction, the counteracting modifications and the maiming of subjectivity inherent to this
process, and thus the prospect of authoritarianism arising from within democratic societies, particularly in moments of
crisis.
Moreover, as I have also argued, this notion of negative totality can be reconfigured to account for neoliberalism,
the emergence of the 2008 crisis, its miserable aftermath, and the rise of right-wing authoritarian populism. The
modification of state and economic policy along neoliberal lines revived profits even as it unintentionally culminated
in a crisis-prone trajectory of immiseration, financialization, and debt that was realized in the 2008 crisis. Yet rather
than such a cataclysmic crisis leading to the coming to consciousness of liberatory movements or social democratic
reform, it was counteracted by heightened neoliberalism, further misery, and the rise of authoritarian populism that
only looks to further this dynamic of regression by counteracting capitalism's crisis tendencies through ramping up
its authoritarian misery. In other words, the further regression of subjectivity has once again favored the further
regression of the system.
If this is the case, it would behoove contemporary critical theory to follow Kim and Chari's calls to critique capi-
talism's limits on the basis of its emancipatory overcoming, but now from the perspective of the Adornian relationship
between critical theory and the critique of political economy. This would further develop an account of the crisis-ridden
and counteracting reproduction of contemporary society as a negative totality comprising the dynamic interplay of
subject and object in the economy, state, and culture. Yet doing so would not resign us to Adorno's fabled pessimism.
Rather, it would also redeploy Adorno's critique of negative totality, insofar as such a notion of totality enumerates this
process of reproduction it is employed as “critical category” (Adorno, 1981, p. 12). This critique seeks to cultivate the
autonomy of subjects by pointing to the contradictory character, ultimate irrationality, and origins of the antagonistic
social relations that reproduce the domination, maiming, and misery inherent to such a totality. This in turn informs
emancipatory politicization insofar as it “salvages or helps to establish” (Adorno, 1981, p. 12) the “visible counter-
tendencies” (Adorno 1968) that do not obey its dominating reproductive logic. In so doing, such a notion of critical
theory points to the possibility of not only grasping the social dimensions of our dark time but also of cultivating the
subjective fortitude necessary to negate its negative objectivity.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I presented earlier versions of this article at the Global Adorno conference and the University of Singidunum. I would
like to thank the participants and organizers, particularly Johan Hartle, Andrea Jovanović, and Fabian Freyenhagen for
12 O'KANE

their feedback and support. I would also like to thank to the two anonymous readers for their constructive and helpful
comments.

NOTES
1
See Kim, Azmanova, and Chari for their respective criticisms of Habermas on this issue and Azmanova and Chari for their
criticisms of Honneth. In my view, Habermas and Honneth's approaches to critical theory not only fail to provide an account
of social crisis in relation to the critique of political economy (as Azmanova, Kim and Chari show) but in so doing cannot
grasp the aftermath of the crisis, especially the rise of right-wing authoritarian populism, further calling into question the
pertinence of their approach to a critical theory of contemporary society. For my criticism of Habermas and Honneth along
these lines, see Chris O'Kane (2017).
2
As this article is concerned with establishing a relationship between the critique of political economy and critical theory
relevant to our current time, I refrain from discussing Azmanova's approach to this issue, which likewise eschews considering
the contemporary relevance of Adorno in favor of a neo-Polanyian approach. The latter has certainly been an influential
alternative to Marxian analyses of the crisis. Yet I hold that the neo-Polanyian accounts of the crisis and its aftermath—
as a process of disembedding and re-embedding—are flawed for reasons that cannot be addressed at length here. For my
criticisms of Nancy Fraser's neo-Polanyian analysis see O'Kane (2017). For further criticisms of Fraser's use of Polanyi see
Sparsam, Eversberg, Haubner, Mader, Muraca, and Pahl (2014). For a criticism of the inapplicability of the Polanyian and
neo-Polanyian approach the 2008 crisis and its aftermath, which points out that “The schema of the double movement has
turned out to be just about the poorest guide to the post-crisis development of capitalism that we could have had,” see Martin
Konings (2015).
3
I use the terms traditional and neo-classical Marxist to refer to readings of Marx's theory of crisis as an emancipatory theory
of crisis along the lines of the revolutionary theory of crisis that was prevalent in classical Marxism.
4
Since such a theory holds that the secular tendencies of capitalist accumulation will be realized in a cataclysmic crisis of cap-
italism that triggers class consciousness and leads to its emancipatory overcoming, I occasionally use cataclysmic, final, or
terminal crisis to refer to this theory of crisis in what follows. As Clarke (1994) points out, Marx and Marxism have several
different theories of crisis and a number of different explanations of emancipatory crisis, a discussion of which stands out-
side the scope of this article. The definition of emancipatory crisis I use here is intended to capture the shared qualities of
such a theory of crisis that is prevalent in cassical Marxism and traditional Marxism, and which forms the basis of Adorno's
interpretation and modification of what he terms “Marx's law of crisis.”
5
I have chosen to focus on these works because, as I try to show in what follows, they articulate a relationship between
Adorno's interpretation of the critique of political economy, negative totality, crises, counteracting tendencies, and authori-
tarianism that can be reconfigured to critique contemporary capitalist society.
6
Chari's interpretation of Adorno's late critical theory in tandem with her periodization of neoliberalism as historically distinct
from Fordism leads her to presuppose the irrelevance of Adorno's theory of Fordist capitalism, and by extension, his critique
of capitalist society, for neoliberal capitalism.
7
Kim notes early critical theory's account of capitalism and crisis in regard to its analysis of fascism. However, due to her read-
ing of Habermas and Postone's work as responses to the Dialectic of Enlightenment’s transhistorical theory of instrumental
reason, in accordance with her secular reading of the crisis, she forecloses the possibility of turning to Adorno's later work.
8
The familiarity that Chari refers to can be attested to by the fact that these points are made in seminal works in the field by
luminaries such as Jay (1984a, 1984b), Wiggershaus (1995), Arato (1997) and Feenberg (2014).
9
A discussion of Adorno's complex historical relationship with Pollock exceeds the limits of this article. Here I am concerned
with assessing the validity of the dominant interpretation of this relationship in regard to the development of Adorno's crit-
ical theory following the Dialectic of Enlightenment.
10
See, for instance, the statement that “the conscious decisions of the company chairmen execute capitalism's old law of value”
(Horkheimer & Adorno, 1969, p. 30).
11 As Schmidt puts it: “Adorno was unconvinced by Pollock's vision of a society that, having transformed the crises that plagued

earlier forms of capitalism into ‘mere problems of administration,’ could hold out ‘the promise of security and a more abun-
dant life for every subject who submits voluntarily and completely.’ Though he conceded that Pollock might be correct in
his pessimistic assessment of the ubiquity of political domination throughout history, he rejected what he characterized as
Pollock's optimistic belief that the new order would be any more stable than the one it replaced. He saw such a conclusion
as resting on the ‘undialectical assumption that in an antagonistic society a non-antagonistic economy would be possible.’
What Pollock had produced struck him as an inversion of Kafka: ‘Kafka presented the hierarchy of bureaucrats as Hell. Here
Hell transforms itself into a hierarchy of bureaucrats.’”
12
Here it should be noted, contra Pollock, that Adorno (2003) still argues for the persistence of antagonism, immiseration, and
Marx's law of crisis. However, much like in his 1968 work Adorno argues that this dynamic had been counteracted, if not
O'KANE 13

superseded, leading to a dominating form of integration and regression in which “pauperization does exist to the degree that
the bourgeois class really is an anonymous and unconscious class, and the both it and the proletariat are dominated by the
system” (Adorno, 2003, p. 104).
13
Backhaus, Reichelt, and Bonefeld's important work point to the roles that social constitution, autonomization, and person-
ification play in Adorno's interpretation of the critique of political economy and how this pertains to his notion of society
as subject and society as object. However, they refrain from focusing on Adorno's notion of crisis or on how these aspects
of his interpretation of the critique of political economy pertain to Adorno's interpretation of crisis, and thus they likewise
overlook the role of crisis in Adorno's critical theory of negative totality. Consequently, they also refrain from considering
the contemporary relevance of these ideas.
14
This can be seen in Adorno's broad characterization of “the highly obscure and difficult theory of the so-called law of value”
as “the summation of all the social acts taking place through exchange. It is through this process that society maintains itself
and, according to Marx continues to reproduce itself and expand despite all the catastrophes that may eventuate” (Adorno,
2006, p. 50).
15
For a more in-depth discussion of the development of these relationships see Chris O'Kane (forthcoming).
16 This is why, as Adorno states in the 1968 Introduction to Sociology, that “the concept of exchange is, as it were, the hinge
connecting the conception of a critical theory of society to the construction of the concept of society as a totality” (Adorno,
2000, p. 32).
17 As I argue in O'Kane (forthcoming) this seminar is integral to the interpretation of Marx Adorno develops in his contribu-
tions in The Positivist Dispute. I thus contend it can be read as enumerating the interpretation of crisis he presents in the
introduction.
18 Such an interpretation also mirrors Adorno's summary of Marx's theory of crisis in Adorno (2003, pp. 103–104): “what is
essential here is the concept of pauperization itself, not its sophisticated modification. However, it is a strict concept from
economics defined by the absolute law of accumulation. The industrial reserve army, overpopulation, and pauperism grow in
proportion to ‘functioning capital, and at the same time they depress wages. Pauperization is the flip side of the free play of
economic forces in the liberal system, whose theory is reduced ad absurdum by the Marxist analysis: with the growth in social
wealth there is also, under capitalist relations of production with their immanent systemic compulsions, a corresponding
growth in social poverty.”
19
See in particular “The Meaning of Working through the Past,” where Adorno not only make the famous statement “that I
consider the survival of National Socialism within democracy to be potentially more menacing than the survival of fascist
tendencies against democracy,” but also makes the claim that the potential for authoritarianism and fascism lives on, due the
objective subjective dynamic elucidated above, particularly in times of crisis (pp. 97–100). Similar claims can also be found
in “Education after Auschwitz” (p. 194). Here it should also be noted that the emphasis Adorno provides on the formation
of authoritarian personality and the emergence of authoritarian societies in regard to the subjective-objective dynamic of
negative totality remedies what he and others saw as the all-too subjective approach provided in The Authoritarian Person-
ality (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1964). See also Adorno's discussion of this issue in “Remarks on The
Authoritarian Personality” and “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America” all (except The Authoritarian Person-
ality) in Adorno, (2005). For a discussion of how these ideas informed Adorno's critical theory as a whole during this period
see John Abromeit (2016) and Lydia Goehr (2005).
20 As he states, “A dialectical theory of society concerns itself with structural laws . . . tendencies, which more or less strin-
gently follow the historical constitution of the total system. The Marxist models for this were the law of value, the law of
accumulation, the law of economic crisis” (Adorno, 1968).
21 Following the suggestion of the second reader I have amended Redmond's translation from “doom” to “fate.” As they point
out, using fate, rather than doom, emphasizes the loss of autonomy in capitalism.
22
As McNally (2011) shows, subprime lending on its own went from $130 billion in 2000 to $625 billion in 2005.
23 Thus, as Charnock, Purcell and Ribera-Fumaz (2014) point out, “the current crisis was born out of the immanent tendency in

capitalism to develop the productive forces without regard to the limit of the market. The more recent development of cap-
italism has a certain specificity, however—in that periods of sustained accumulation since the 1970s have been conditional
upon the global expansion of debt (and, indeed, the spectacular increase in its trading as an asset). Iñigo Carrera (2008, p. 86)
stresses that, as a counterpart to the reconfiguration of the (new international division of labor), the 68 percent increase in
production by the world's leading economies since 1973 had been sustained by a 156 percent increase in public and private
indebtedness from then until 1992; while, in the subsequent period to 2000, total GDP grew a further 26 per cent, with a
further 48 percent increase in indebtedness. See also Dyer-Witherford (2015), pp. 143–144.
24
See Sheikh (2016), pp. 734–745 for an overview of the bailouts, austerity programs, and further decline in wages that under-
lay the economic recovery.
25
Thus, as Seymour (2017), Khazan (2017) and Rosenfeld (2017) point out, many of those who supported Trump and Brexit did
so for the overlapping motives of cultural anxiety, insecurity, and scapegoating, which Brexit and Trump promised to address.
14 O'KANE

26
As Heather Boushey notes “This is not a marker we should be super excited to get back to. . . . In the abstract, more debt
signals optimism. But in reality, families are using debt as a mechanism to pay for things their incomes don't support.”
27 Although a full engagement with Chari's interpretation of Lukács stands outside the purview of this article, it is curious to
note that, despite utilizing Adorno's notion of aesthetic experience in conjunction with her neo-Lukácsian account of the
reified passivity of neoliberal subjectivity, she does not address a point noted in here: namely, that Adorno already held that
subjectivity had been maimed by previous incarnations of capitalism, thus calling into question not only Chari's account of
neoliberal subjectivity but also her periodization of it.

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AUTHOR'S BIOGRAPHY

Chris O'Kane teaches philosophy, politics, and economics at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of
New York. He works on critical theory and political economy, broadly construed.

How to cite this article: O'Kane C. “Society maintains itself despite all the catastrophes that may eventuate”:
Critical theory, negative totality, and crisis. Constellations. 2018;1–15. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12341