Adorno on Actually Existing Socialism

While studies abound on the Frankfurt School’s Marxism per se—and Adorno’s Marxism in particular—there have been no sustained analyses of Adorno’s reflections on “actually existing socialism,” scattered, as they are, across his body of work. This essay addresses this scholarly lacuna, arguing that, while Adorno’s remarks may not amount to a conventional “theory” of actually existing socialism, a critical engagement with them better illuminates his commitment to dialectics, specifically as it is articulated in three distinct but related aspects of his philosophical project: namely, the relation between need and nature, theory and praxis, and the individual and the collective, each of which is rooted in his dynamic concept of emancipation. Adorno identifies the persistence of bourgeois consciousness as it constituted the ideology of actually existing socialist societies. At the same time, he is careful to distinguish the manifestations of such ideology in these societies from its manifestations in capitalist society. Adorno thus critiques actually existing socialism on Marxist grounds, aiming to recuperate the more robustly emancipatory dimension of Marxism he saw betrayed by these societies. The essay concludes with some brief speculations on the theoretical affinities between Adorno and the late sociologist Moishe Postone.