Normative values and social critique: On Adorno and Marx

Contemporary critical theory elevates social norms to the status of positive knowledge and proclaims a politics of normative rightness to realise positive freedom and material equality in capitalist society. By accepting the positivity of norms, it fetishises them and prevents their denunciation, which alone exposes them. Based on the critical theories of Marx and Adorno, the article examines social norms as norms of a historically specific social content. In this process, the freedom of form is exposed in its content as the ‘freedom to starve’ (Adorno). Critique of exploitation does not call for normative arguments to understand its normative deficiencies with a view to achieving improvements. To understand the social norms, one must think in and through them to grasp their secret in the freedom of labour, which is the freedom of needy individuals to secure wage income. The circumstance that their prospects depend on the profitability of their labour connects the (promise of) freedom with exploitation.