Congealed labour is subject-object mediated, never fetishizable as pure subjectivity.

Evidence

As an aside, here you can see very clearly what is meant by Marxian materialism’s constantly recurring concept of congealed or objectified labour. Yet at the same time, fully in keeping with Hegel, this congealed labour is not conceived of as something purely subjective, but as something already mediated by subject and object. It is conceived as something which contains in itself the labour of the subject as well as the natural material on which this labour is performed. … In doing so, Adorno argues in Negative Dialectics, he was philosophically – at a time when the official philosophical thematics lay already behind him – saying no less than that labor could not be hypostatized in any form, neither in the form of diligent hands nor in that of mental production. Such hypostasis merely extends the illusion of the predominance of the productive principle. It comes to be true only in relation to that nonidentical [element] which Marx in his disdain for epistemology called first by the crude, too narrow name of ‘nature’, later on by that of ‘natural material’ and by other less incriminated terms. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1307

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘congealed/objectified labour’ as Hegelian subject-object mediation rather than purely subjective effort, connecting to Marx’s Gotha Programme polemic.
• XREF: Ties Adorno’s reading of Marxian materialism to Hegel’s dialectic and to Negative Dialectics’ notion of the nonidentical.