Capitalist economic laws are both real and socially necessary illusions

Evidence

‘What is meant here’, Adorno comments, ‘is certainly not Feuerbach’s anthropological concept of nature, against which Marx aimed dialectical materialisminthesenseof aHegelianrepriseagainsttheLeftHegelians.Theso-called law of nature that is merely one of capitalist society, after all, is therefore called “mystification” by Marx’ when he refers to the ‘law of capitalist accumulation, mystified by the economists into a supposed law of nature’. ‘There is a contradiction here: on the one hand, Marx speaks with the scientist’s passion of the inexorable laws of nature, in particular of the evolution of the laws of economics. At the same time, however, these laws are shown to be a mystification, an illusion’. After all, the ‘organic nature of capitalist society is both an actuality and at the same time a socially necessary illusion. The illusion signifies that within this society laws can only be implemented as natural processes over people’s heads, while their validity arises from the form of the relations of production within which production takes place’. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1343

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the productive contradiction in Marx’s notion of natural law vis-à-vis mystification — the core Adorno reading.
• XREF: This is the same move as Adorno’s reading of ‘second nature’ as both actual and illusory; connects to Lukács’s reification theory. — connects to: Money as arbitrary fiction can only represent real social labour — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 612; Capitalist accumulation obeys law-like principles yet produces only illusory novelty — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 2145; Governments conflate capitalist economic rationality with rationality itself. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 369 (+3 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does ‘socially necessary illusion’ differ from ideology critique’s false consciousness in later critical theory?