Capitalism’s own productive development raised worker living standards and defused revolutionary hunger

Evidence

The treatment of pauperisation theory Adorno mentions in the letters to his parents and Horkheimer constitutes only one section of the ‘Reflections’ in which Adorno refers directly the Communist Manifesto and its militant conclusion: ‘Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win’. From Adorno’s perspective just under a century after those words were written, the proletariat seems to hardly resemble how it had been depicted in them: … The proletariat does have more to lose than its chains. … Shorter working hours; better food, housing, and clothing; protection for family members and for the worker in his old age; an average increase in life expectancy – all these things have come to the workers with the development of the technical forces of production. There can be no question of their being driven by hunger to join forces and make a revolution. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 662

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Adorno’s letters to parents/Horkheimer on pauperisation theory, and to the Marxian theory of history as a whole. Resonates with the broader historiographical debate on whether Adorno abandoned or revised Marxian categories. — connects to: Lukács located revolutionary agency in workers’ self-awareness as commodities — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 66; Capitalism produced revolutionary classes at both poles of its expropriation — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1286; Capitalism calibrates incentives to make workers risk death for subsistence — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 194 (+5 more)
• SEED: Angle: Adorno’s empirical concessions about rising living standards as the actual engine of his pessimistic diagnosis — his pessimism is not despair but a sober accounting of why revolution failed.
• DEFINE: Introduces ‘pauperisation theory’ as a distinct section of Adorno’s ‘Reflections’ — the claim that workers would be driven to revolt by absolute impoverishment.

Broader Connections

• Capitalism produced revolutionary classes at both poles of its expropriation #contradicts (0.85) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1286