Adorno derives class divisions from economic conditions rather than the reverse.

Evidence

The sole focus on the exchange-relation strikes this participant as ‘merely a detour which ultimately must lead to the fundamental phenomenon existing in all eras of society and not emerging only from relationships of exchange, but also from the facts of previous societies: namely, the existence of classes’. Adorno responds that he finds this outlook to be unrealistic: ‘One must not hypostatise class-relations and attempt to reduce history to them, independently of the economy. On the contrary, one has to derive class-divisions from economic conditions’. In a session from another seminar at the end of 1965, Adorno affirms the position he had already taken in ‘Reflections on Class Theory’: given that class-relations are assumed by the production of surplus-value, which depends on the consumption of the commodity of labour-power, this production ‘implicitly contains their acceptance and an element of the fetishistic’. After all, the acceptance of class-relations as transhistorical facts misses that these relations ‘reproduce [themselves] by way of the [exchange] of equivalents’. This claim again indicates that history for Adorno cannot simply be viewed as the history of class struggles. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1136

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies Adorno’s core methodological stance: class-relations must be derived from economic conditions, not hypostatised as transhistorical facts.
• XREF: Connects to the broader revisionist debate over whether Adorno retains Marx’s critique of political economy or abandons it; the ‘pessimistic cul-de-sac’ reading this book counters. — connects to: Adorno used class to mean proletarian class-consciousness, not objective economic position. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1050