Adorno read Marx’s turn to political economy as historically forced by revolution’s failure.

Evidence

According to Adorno, the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, the eleventh of which he alludes to in the prelude of Negative Dialectics, cannotbecorrectlyunderstoodinabstracto,orseveredfromthehistorical dimension. They take on their meaning only in the context of the expectation of imminent revolution which existed at that time; without such an expectation they degenerate into mumbo-jumbo. Once this given possibility failed to be realized, Marx spent decades in the British Museum writing a theoretical work on national economy. That he did so without havingengagedinmuchpraxisinrealityisnotamatterof merebiographical accident; an historical [element] is imprinted even in this. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1196

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that Marx’s decades in the British Museum writing Capital was itself historically imprinted praxis — theory redirected when the moment for change miscarried — is a bold reversal of the standard reading and central to the revisionist thesis this book advances.
• SEED: Essay angle: how a missed revolutionary moment redirected Marx into political economy, and what Adorno’s sympathetic rereading of that retreat says about theory’s ‘resignation’ — reading the British Museum as its own kind of practice.
• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s stated purpose of countering the ‘pessimistic cul-de-sac’ reading of Adorno — this passage grounds revisionism in Adorno’s own historicization of Marx. — connects to: The failed 1848 revolutions forced Marx to abandon immediate-catastrophe theory — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 506

Broader Connections

• The failed 1848 revolutions forced Marx to abandon immediate-catastrophe theory #expands (0.85) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 506