Well-known contributions to philosophy in Europe and America in the twentieth century are often divided into analytical and continental philosophy. Analytical philosophers often state their arguments with formal reasoning and notation, while concentrating on narrow points. How do you know that you have not always used 'green' to mean grue? Continental philosophers provide a more intuitive reasoning and focus on larger issues such as culture. Gender is performative. I take no issue to those who argue that the division is not well-defined. I lean more towards the analytical side, albeit I try to reject logical positivism.

Sometimes, when I read postmodernists - another ill-defined term - I can follow, but I do not retain much. I find intriguing Lukacs' essay on reification, in which he builds on Karl Marx's work on commodity fetishism and vulgar political economy. I have more use for Foucault's post structuralism than Derrida's deconstruction. I find Antonio Gramsci insightful, which is no surprise for somebody building on Piero Sraffa. Herbert Marcuse has a point about instrumental reason in the service of a system that is irrational as a whole. I am never sure when Slavoj Zizek is joking.

But here I want to focus on Theodor Adorno and his 1951 book Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. I could not make much out of his book, Negative Dialetics. I have yet to read The Dialetic of Enlightenment.

As I poorly recall, Minima Moralia has a narrative arc, although it takes some work to perceive it. I was surprised at passages that presume an understanding of technical terms in Marx's political economy. I note a few here.

Here Adorno rejects some concepts of a post-capitalist society because they continue commodity fetishism:

"Sur l'Eau. He who asks what is the goal of an emancipated society is given answers such as the fulfillment of human possibilities or the richness of life. Just as the inevitable question is illegitimate, so the repellent assurance of the answer is inevitable, calling to mind the social-democratic ideal of the personality expounded by heavily-bearded Naturalists of the 'nineties, who were out to have a good time. There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry any more. Every other seeks to apply to a condition that ought to be determined by human needs, a mode of human conduct adapted to production as an end in itself. Into the wishful image of an uninhibited, vital, creative man has seeped the very fetishism of commodities which in bourgeois society brings with it inhibition, impotence, the sterility of the never-changing. The concept of dynamism, which is the necessary complement of bourgeois 'a-historicity', is raised to an absolute, whereas it ought, as an anthropological reflex of the laws of production, to be itself critically confronted, in an emancipated society, with need..." -- Adorno: 155-156.

Adorno draws on the concept of fetishism in other places. I do not know that the above passage is consistent with Marx and Engels in The German Ideology.

In this next passage he uses the concept of the organic composition of capital to write about how working class consciousness is dimmed:

"Puzzle-picture. Why, despite a historical development that has reached the point of oligarchy, the workers are less and less aware that they are such, can be surmised from a number of observations. While objectively the relation of owners and producers to the productive apparatus grows ever more rigid, subjective class membership becomes all the more fluctuating. This tendency is fostered by economic development itself. The organic composition of capital demands, as has often been noted, control through technical experts rather than through factory owners. The latter were the counterpart, as it were, of living labour, the former correspond to the share of machinery in capital. The quantification of technical processes, however, their dissection into minute operations largely independent of education and experience, makes the expertise of these new-style managers to a large degree illusory, a pretence concealing the privilege of being appointed. That technical development has reached a state which makes every function really open to all - this immanently socialist element in progress has been travestied under late industrialism. Membership of the elite seems attainable to everyone. One only waits to be co-opted... ...Preference goes to those who fit in most exactly...That technical forces might permit a condition free of privileges is accredited by all, even those in the shadow, to the social relations which prevent it. In general, subjective class-membership today shows a mobility that allows the rigidity of the economic order itself to be forgotten..." -- Adorno: 193-194.

And, for the last passage I select, Adorno writes about the law of value and, again, the organic composition of capital:

"Novissimum organum. It has long been demonstrated that wage-labour formed the masses of the modern epoch, indeed created the worker himself. As a general principle the individual is not merely the biological basis, but the reflection of the social process; his conciousness of himself as something in-itself is the iI1usion needed to raise his level of performance, whereas in fact the individuated function in the modern economy as mere agents of the law of value. The inner constitution of the individual, not merely his social role, could be deduced from this. Decisive here, in the present phase, is the category of the organic composition of capital. By this the theory of accumulation meant the 'growth in the mass of the means of production, as compared with the mass of the labour-power that vivifies them'. If the integration of society, particularly in totalitarian states, designates subjects more and more exclusively as partial moments in the network of material production, then the 'alteration of the technical composition of capital' is prolonged within those encompassed, and indeed constituted, by the technological demands of the production process. The organic composition of man is growing. That which determines subjects as means of production and not as living purposes, increases with the proportion of machines to variable capital... Only when the process that begins with the metamorphosis of labour-power into a commodity has permeated men through and through and objectified each of their Impulses as formally commensurable variations of the exchange relationship, is it possible for life to reproduce itself under the prevailing relations of production..." -- Adorno: 228-229.

My understanding of the organic composition of capital is straightforward. I take it to be the ratio of constant capital to variable capital, evaluated either with labor values or with prices of production. I do think about the physical composition of capital goods and of issues associated with depreciation. But I certainly do not go into the cultural effects that Adorno writes about.

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