Critical Theory for Heterodox Economists: Questioning the Premises of Supply and Demand

“[It is] crucial from a socio-critical perspective to emphasise that preferences are not naturally given but are shaped by society and can adapt to difficult circumstances or through manipulation.” – Hemmerich/ Henning/ Jörke/ Liesenberg[i]

1. Introduction

Usually, Critical Theory and Economics are, for better or worse, no longer seen to be in a continuum.[ii] Regardless of this, Critical Theory is relevant for all economists who want to understand and explain what they can, otherwise, just state and describe. As this article will argue, the Traditional Theory[iii] of mainstream or neoclassical economics is dependent on Critical Theory already for the sake of its own scientificity. That is because without the latter, the former’s basic talk about preference, utility, supply, and demand remains closer to an construction of Platonic models than to a scientific description of reality. At least for heterodox economists wishing to think outside the narrow box of their discipline and against the questionable directions of its mainstream, Critical Theory is one of the most valuable sources yet to be discovered for the contemporary study of political economy.

To argue for this claim as concisely as possible, the following pages will start with a basic definition of Critical Theory (1) and then explain its relationship to the political economy of Marxism (2). Next, the extracted method of the two first chapters gets applied to the relationship of supply and demand to demonstrate how reality is threatened to disappear behind the idealising mathematisations of mainstream economics (3). The article will conclude with a political twist that may be said to be demanded from the science of political economy itself (4).    

2. What is Critical Theory?

“Critical Theory declares: it does not have to be this way, people can change being, the conditions of change are here now.” – Max Horkheimer[iv]

To put its relevance for today in a nutshell, Critical Theory is there to prove wrong, conceptually as well as empirically, the ideology of the flexible capitalism called neoliberalism as it is paraphrased by Margaret Thatcher’s ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA).[v] That is because Critical Theory’s main hypothesis is that there always is an alternative, meaning that – as the just cited quote from the founding text of Critical Theory has it – the world does not have to be the way we know it, that people are able to change their environments as much as themselves, and that the conditions of possibility of such a transformation are ripe since decades.[vi]

Yet, if this is the case, Critical Theory needs to explain why such change is not happening, why people remain stuck in the given, and why that which is can appear as if it were the only way possible. To be fit for such an explanation, Critical Theory is fundamentally a critique of ideology, that is, an excavation of the removable obstacles between the possible and the actual, or the utopian and the real. As such, ideology can be understood as a pseudo-legitimation or false necessitation of the given status quo and its tendencies; ideology-critique, consequentially, is about making visible ideology and proving it wrong. With the help of ideology-critique, then, neoliberalism as a historically specific accumulation regime of capital can be refuted by showing that the repression of alternatives stands behind the repeatedly invoked freedom of markets, the self-importance of the entrepreneurial self, and the liberty of consumers’ choices. Indeed, it is the neoliberal narrative that shuts down the very question of alternatives to the current status quo. Yet, where is the plurality and where is the freedom of choice neoliberals love to talk about in a worldview that disenables already the question of political change on a grander scale?

Beyond this confinement, it is at the heart of Critical Theory’s method to ask back “behind the premises of officially accepted problem descriptions”[vii]. Exactly this is why it is a Critical instead of a Traditional Theory: whereas the latter limits its own horizon to the approaches of one discipline and its institutionalised biases, the former does not accept such blinkers. Rather, it opens itself up for totality analysis, which can be described as an analysis of the whole. Importantly, such a form of analysis is crucial not only for any possibility of radical change but already for a proper understanding of the world as it is. That is because, since society is compressed in every tiny aspect of social reality, we do not see any detail without the bigger picture. For example, we cannot understand slave labour in today’s chocolate industry if we do not understand this industry’s entanglement within the planetary production chains of global capitalism and its hierarchical interdependencies between ‘core’ and ‘periphery’.[viii] Yet, to understand one through the other, we need a totality analysis that mediates between particular cases and the system at large (which is also called ‘dialectical method’); the two cannot be approached in abstraction from one another.

Moreover, Critical Theory knows that it cannot refute the neoliberal TINA (‘There Is No Alternative’) and point out alternatives if it follows the ways in which that which is presents itself, namely by appearing as if it were the only option. Rather, for Critical Theory, to grasp something already means to enable oneself to change it if need be. For that reason, it looks at every subject from different angles, being intrinsically transdisciplinary by incorporating tools and insights from disciplines such as economics, sociology, historiography, psychology and philosophy within its own approach. In this way, it leaves the narrow viewpoint of mainstream economics behind and broadens the perspective beyond the current situation. In short, Critical Theory overcomes the division of labour already in theory to enable the members of society to do the same in practice. The kind of division of labour that needs to be overcome in this perspective is first and foremost the power-laden division between head and hand, mind and body, production and reproduction, public and private, or politics and economics – a division which is at the cradle of all domination known throughout history, including the present. For example, without the division of labour between head and hand, the power of Ancient Greek citizens (commanding heads) over their slaves (working hands) could not have been realised. Equally, without the division of labour between mind and body, the male dominion of the pater familias (mind) over its property consisting in woman, children, cattle, land (bodies) would have been unthinkable. Similarly, without the division of labour between public and private which safeguards, within the (neo-)liberal tradition, the private from public intervention, the privatisation of public goods for the sake of private gains could not have happened throughout the 19^th, 20^th and 21^st centuries. Without overcoming these divisions in (critical) theory, however, they could not be overcome in (emancipatory) practice either. Hence, in this peculiar way, Critical Theory continues, extends, and deepens the study and critique of political economy as it is known from Karl Marx by developing a critique of ideology along the lines of totality analysis.[ix] With this approach, what can be proven wrong is TINA as the grand narrative of neoliberalism: there are not only many alternatives already here and now but much better ones to the existing status quo.

3. Critical Theory and Marxism(s)

„The only way to avoid the work process as known from the factory and the office is to adapt to it in leisure time.” – Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno[x]

Critical Theory, then, is a Marxist school of thought – a school that trains in antiauthoritarianism, or, better, that attempts at teaching maturity (Erziehung zur Mündigkeit).[xi] Yet, what does it mean to be a Marxist school? To be clear, there is not just one Marxism but many. Marxism is a collective singular, and as such a plurality of Marxist sciences and strategies, or a form of checks and balances between Marxisms and Marx himself.[xii] Still, in the irrevocable core of every Marxism we find an analysis of capitalism as an exploitative system. As such, capitalism does not only exploit, say, the extreme case of slave labourers in the chocolate industry we already dealt with but, rather, the whole of the working population all around the world, be it in the Global South or in the Global North. More precisely, capital exploits labour through the expropriation of the surplus that those who work have produced. A Marxist revolution as the immanent purpose of Marxist science, thus, would be less about socialisation as dispossession but, on the opposite, about an “expropriation of the expropriators” (Marx), that is, about the resocialisation of those values created by social labour which got privatised by capital. In this sense, any Marxist revolution heading towards socialism is not about less wealth or democracy but about transcending systematic exploitation as the structural privatisation of a commonly produced surplus. Hence, its goal is the deepening of political deliberation also within the liberally outsourced or externalised (privatised) areas of economy and technology.

Critical Theory, as all other Marxist schools, shares this aim. Yet, since Marx and Marxisms always pointed out the historical nature of their own takes on the world, a changed society also needs a changed Marxism, successively discovering new aspects in Marx. Critical Theory has remained faithful to this basic insight as well. In its view, the competitively organised laissez-faire capitalism of classical bourgeois markets known from the 19^th century transformed, with the beginning of the 20^th, into a monopoly capitalism of huge companies, state-trust joint ventures, and their combined economies of scale. Under Fordism, production became mass production, as much as consumption became mass consumption under Keynesianism. Hence, the two belong together and build, as one big scheme, the late-capitalist dialectic of productivism (producing for the sake of producing more) and consumerism (consuming for the sake of consuming more).[xiii] In the just sketched transformation of capitalism from the 19^th to the 20^th century, the economy, its commodities and ways of distribution became culturalised through the advertisement agencies of consumerism, as much as culture became economised via the monopolising culture industry of Hollywood and other representatives of big capital.[xiv] As a result, culture (including art) and the economy were no longer conceptualised as enemies or incommensurabilities, as in the 19^th century, but grasped as one mediated whole. In Marxist terms, the superstructure of culture and the base of the economy could no longer be split off from each other in any convincing macro-model of society because they became intermingled on every level.[xv] Hence, for Critical Theory as a Marxist school developing at the very height of the turning point from laissez-faire to monopoly capitalism, to study and criticise political economy also meant to study and criticise culture. Obviously, this shift has taken place on ever deeper levels also with the so-called post-Fordist mode of accumulation in which the service sector has become decisive, and in which the creative industries – including sci-tech – became the most profitable segment of the economy. Historically, this post-Fordist mode of accumulation was accompanied by the already discussed technocratic governing of neoliberalism and its ideology of TINA since the oil price shocks of the 1970s, which were used to wave farewell to the Keynesian welfare statism of the post-war period. The politics of neoliberalism started in Southern America (Pinochet’s Chile), continued in the Anglo-American world (under Thatcher and Reagan), and peaked in Eastern Europe (after the fall of the Wall and its turbocapitalist shock doctrines), before rebuilding Western Europe (under the coalitions of New Labour). Despite neoliberals’ official doctrine of the weak state, it could have never been established without strong if not repressive statue apparatuses and their respective governments.   

Notwithstanding the up-to-dateness of Critical Theory for the culture-intensive political economies of both Fordist monopoly capitalism and post-Fordist neoliberalism, many have complained about the elitism of a Critical Theory that no longer deals with the hard facts of economics but with the vague judgements of cultural critique. Yet, again, this move to culture is not a move away from the economy and thus not an abandonment of Marxist political economy but precisely its formulation under renewed conditions. A critique of ideology using totality analysis can demonstrate that superstructure and base no longer work unidirectionally, if they ever have, but are reorganised as a dialectics going in both ways. Hence, as much as culture becomes economic and material (with advertisement, PR, the service sector, the financial markets etc.), the economic base becomes ideological and a question of politics (deregulation of financial products, liberalisation of international trade, flexibilisation of labour etc. are political decisions and not naturally given normalities). With this reconceptualisation, however, the lack in alternatives known from neoliberal ideology can no longer be inferred from techno-economic facts but must be referred to the question of power and politics. In other words, neoliberal TINA can only be understood as an intrinsically political agenda, and more precisely as a power-politics of the rich and wealthy.

Critical Theory as a Marxist school established in the early 20^th century makes clear that behind the alleged lack of alternatives best known from today’s still neoliberal hegemony resides, if not the specific power-politics of ruling classes, then at least the collectively alterable present of a historical contingency called the present. After all, Critical Theory asks back behind the premises of an ideologised problem description known from mainstream economics and lays bare the political, social, and cultural axiomatics on which these premises are based.    

3. Shaped Preferences: The Equation of Supply and Demand Gets Defined by its First Half

„The prevalent material needs and satisfactions are shaped – and controlled – by the requirements of exploitation.” – Herbert Marcuse[xvi]

Since the realms of the economy and culture have collapsed into each other with the early 20^th century, labour entered the area of private and personal life, of leisure time and recreative activities, as we have experienced most directly with the expansion of the home office and its internet of things. The result was the invention of the prosumer who consumes by producing and produces through consumption.[xvii] This prosumer has nothing to do with the classical liberal actor as the activity of autonomy and rationality; rather, as a neoliberal actant, it is a newly remodelled heteronomous and irrational medio-passivity. As this new actant the prosumer is adapted to the principles of factory and office – as the introductory quote in the last section had it – also at home, working in and as leisure and immersing itself in work as if toil were enjoyment. Arguably, this change in what modern individuals or subjects are into postmodern actants[xviii] – read: into irrational, heteronomous, self-subjecting beings – also changes the categories of economics that are classically taken from the liberal creed of the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th centuries. Hence, exploitation, meanwhile, also realises itself through self-exploitation: to a certain degree, the worker (the exploited) and the capitalist (the exploiting) are merged.[xix] This new reality does not enforce a revision of Marxist analyses but confirms their insight into the capitalist tendency towards expanding exploitation as the universalisation of commodification, colonisation and alienation as the universalisation of real inversion.[xx]

Unfortunately, mainstream economics is dehistoricising its own discipline to such a degree that it believes it can abstract itself away from completely changed circumstances. Yet, if economics is supposed to be a science, then it must include the transformation of its own subject – the economy – into its theorising and modelling. Again, to do so, Critical Theory may be of some help. The whole of neoclassical economics as it is taught today – in universities all around the world in hegemonic fashion – is based on a limited number of simple but untenable premises: that the preferences consumers have and that support economists with the demand-side of their equations are no material for further scrutiny; that these preferences actually depict what people want by themselves and nothing else; that they, both the preferences and their subjects are, if not natural, at least rational and autonomous; and that those that have them are black boxes not worthy of any further scientific scrutiny.

Now, as Critical Theory asks back behind these premises of neoclassical economics, these turn out to be outdated. After all, with the help of ideology-critical totality analysis, it can be shown that individuals are no black boxes but sociologically approachable entities which are, as social beings, embedded in and (over-)determined by social structures; that their preferences, which follow from their needs, desires, and wishes, do not always come about naturally, or in any rational process, but are often manipulated by bigger players in their environment to their own detriment; that they depict, more often than not, rather the (im-)balance of power of capitalist society than the individual truth of any single subject; and that the supply-side of economists’ equations thus becomes of prime importance to judge whether a specific economy actually meets supply and demand as it is supposed to do. Again, Critical Theory asks back behind the premises of given mainstream economics: What if, after all, the preferences individuals have are the result of a powerful advertisement-industry shaping its customers in its own image? What if the demand they accumulate is supplied by the very concentration of suppliers – that is, what if demand is demanded, created, fostered, and unleashed by the side of supply? In other words, what if consumers – in their preferences, their needs, wishes, and desires – are produced as part and parcel of a prosumer  process organised within the dialectic of productivism and consumerism? In short, what if demand is following supply instead of the other way around? And if demand is supplied by the suppliers, why wonder about the marvellous match between the two? Why wonder if they are matched not via the price mechanism of competitive markets but via monopoly capitalism dictating what can and should be bought and sold in the first place?

Critical Theory, for one, would say that all the what ifs of the past paragraph are reality since long. Obviously, since the 20^th century and today, still, we are no longer living in the 19^th. Hence, the whole of today’s mainstream as neoclassical economics, from its complex statistics to its sophisticated deductions, becomes highly problematic – if it is not utterly missing the point of its own subject: The economy as the way to supply the demand that humans have in the most efficient manner possible. After all, monopoly capitalism – and ‘post-Fordist’ neoliberalism is not less but more monopoly-based than Fordist Keynesianism – has precisely the ‘prosuming’ effect of supplying demand, producing consumption or, as the starting quote of this chapter has it, of shaping preferences according to the exploitative logic of capitalism by monopolising its subjects from within. This, however, is not the fault of any greedy CEO but of the capitalist system as a whole and its structuring logic. Formulated in the classical words of Marx, if there is a huge machinery of productivism on the side of the economic base (Basis), then this very machinery needs its double on the side of the cultural and social superstructure (Überbau), which feeds consumerism by shaping people’s needs, desires, wishes and preferences.  

Of course, these insights can only be acquired if one is asking back behind the premises of the given problem description within economics, as Critical Theory allows us to do. In this way, it may be understood that mainstream economics constantly speaks about the quantifiable relations between supply and demand on markets mediated by a price mechanism only to fall completely silent regarding its unjustified abstractions from real individuals and their qualitative internals. The moment economics would need to discuss the latter, it would see how its own system fails. Hence, with the ideology-critical totality analysis of Critical Theory, the system of mainstream economics can be debunked as a logically consistent yet idealised whole of falsified premises.   

4. Conclusion: We have nothing to lose but our Supply Chains – Demanding Demand Back From Capital

From a Marxist perspective, however, the only way to prove these premises wrong is by falsifying them not only in theory but also in practice. In other words, not only the mathematical idealisation of mainstream economics but also, and even more, the materiality of capital’s political economy needs to be overcome if the goal of economics and its economy – the most efficient mediation of supply and demand – is supposed to be met. Only if the productive forces, including their sci-tech branch, would pass out of capital’s and into humans’ hands could these humans decide by themselves, in democratic fashion, on their own internal worlds – instead of being shaped by the requirements of exploitation.[xxi] Since, under capitalism, the private is modelled after the economy, to be able to speak of the preferences and the needs of individuals and not of those of capital, we need to speak about repoliticising the privatised economy despite all neoliberal ideologies of TINA. As a recent publication from current Critical Theory has it: „The needs human beings will develop when finally freed from the yoke of exploitation, alienation and ideology, will be qualitatively different from their current needs.”[xxii] Perhaps, when the spell of capital has been broken in this way, we can finally speak about demand being met by supply again, and about their meeting point as a free enterprise, without putting the world on its head. Yet, we will only be able to reach this situation if we refute both the idealisations of neoclassical economics and the correlated grand narrative of neoliberalism about the lack of system alternatives not only in Critical Theory but in emancipatory – political – practice.

Literaturverzeichnis

Adorno, Theodor W. (ed.) (1980) Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie, Darmstadt: Luchterhand.

Adorno, Theodor W. (2021) Erziehung zur Mündigkeit Vorträge und Gespräche mit Hellmut Becker 1959 bis 1969, Berlin: Suhrkamp. 

Böhme, Gernot (2018) Ästhetischer Kapitalismus, Berlin: Suhrkamp.

Celikates, Robin; Jaeggi, Rahel; Loick, Daniel; Schmidt, Christian (2023) 11 Theses on Needs, online at KTB, https://criticaltheoryinberlin.de/interventions/11-theses-on-needs/.

Deleuze, Gilles (1992) Postscript on the Societies of Control, in October, 59, pp. 3-7. 

Dörre, Klaus (2009) Die neue Landnahme. Dynamiken und Grenzen des Finanzmarktkapitalismus, in Dörre, Klaus; Lessenich, Stephan; Rosa, Hartmut (2017) Soziologie – Kapitalismus – Kritik. Eine Debatte, Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 21-86.

Fisher, Mark (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is there no Alternative?, Winchester/ Washington: zero books.

Han, Byung-Chul (2014) Psychopolitik. Neoliberalismus und die neuen Machttechniken, Frankfurt/ Main: Fischer.

Hemmerich, Luca; Henning, Christoph; Jörke, Dirk; Liesenberg, Katharina (2023) Ein Plädoyer für die Rettung der Bedürfnisse, online at Theorieblog, https://www.theorieblog.de/index.php/2023/09/ein-plaedoyer-fuer-die-rettung-der-beduerfnisse/, last accessed 12/11/2024.

Honneth, Axel (2002) Idiosynkrasie als Erkenntnismittel. Gesellschaftskritik im Zeitalter des normalisierten Intellektuellen, in Honneth, Axel (2007) Pathologien der Vernunft. Geschichte und Gegenwart der Kritischen Theorie, Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 219-234.

Horkheimer, Max (1992) Traditionelle und kritische Theorie, Frankfurt/ Main: Fischer.

Horkheimer, Max; Adorno, Theodor W. (2013) Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente, Frankfurt/ Main: Fischer.

Luxemburg, Rosa (1970) Die Akkumulation des Kapitals. Ein Beitrag zur ökonomischen Erklärung des Imperialismus, Frankfurt/ Main: Verlag Neue Kritik.

Marcuse, Herbert (1972) Counterrevolution and Revolt, Boston: Beacon Press.

Meisner, Lukas (2021) The Political Economy of Postmodernism and the Spirit of Post-Bourgeois Capitalism, in &&&Journal. The New Centre for Research & Practice, online.

Meisner, Lukas (2022) Objective Alienation. No essentialism, nowhere, in Berlin Journal of Critical Theory, 6:3, pp. 95-134.

Meisner, Lukas (2023) Wir müssen mehr leisten – für die Erhaltung unserer Lebensgrundlagen, in Wirtschaftswoche, Handelsblatt, online and printed, 28/1/2023.

Meisner, Lukas (2023) Liquid Reification. A conceptual update in Lukács’ Spirit, in Jahrbuch der internationalen Lukács-Gesellschaft, 19, pp. 113-126.

Meisner, Lukas (2023) Medienkritik ist links. Warum wir eine medienkritische Linke brauchen, Berlin: Das Neue Berlin.

Meisner, Lukas (2024) Für eine Dialektik von Marx und Marxismus: Den Postmarxismus widerlegen, in Jahrbuch für marxistische Gesellschaftstheorie, 3, pp. 173-180.

Meisner, Lukas (2025 forthcoming) Critical Marxist Theory. Political Autonomy and the Radicalising Project of Modernity, New York: Palgrave.

Ritzer, George; Jurgenson, Nathan (2010) Production, Consumption, Prosumption, in Journal of Consumer Culture, 10:1, pp. 13-36.

Wallerstein, Immanuel (2004) World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction, Durham: Duke University Press.

Walter, Theresa; Meisner, Lukas (eds.) (2020) Avantgarden vom Kopf auf die Füße gestellt. Kritik an Kunst vs. Künstlerkritik, Berlin: HU Press.

[i]Hemmerich, Luca; Henning, Christoph; Jörke, Dirk; Liesenberg, Katharina (2023) Ein Plädoyer für die Rettung der Bedürfnisse, online at Theorieblog, https://www.theorieblog.de/index.php/2023/09/ein-plaedoyer-fuer-die-rettung-der-beduerfnisse/: “[Es ist] aus gesellschaftskritischer Perspektive entscheidend zu betonen, dass Präferenzen nicht natürlich gegeben, sondern gesellschaftlich geformt sind und sich an schwierige Umstände oder auch durch Manipulation anpassen können.” All translations of sources are by the author.

[ii]At least, the International Summer School in Critical Theory 2024 explicitly put centre stage as its core topic Social Critique and Economics.

[iii]In the founding text of Critical Theory, it is argued that bourgeois science (or Traditional Theory) narrows its object down to its own discipline, cuts it out of overall social contexts and conditions of development and thus positivistically fossilises it into a fact, which would otherwise be open to transformational practice. By contrast, Marxist science (or Critical Theory) examines, beyond the capitalist division of mental labour, its subject in its correlation with social objectivity on a whole and with socialised subjects in their particularisation, thus re-historicising it and demonstrating its changeability beyond the scientistic belief in the given. See Horkheimer, Max (1992) Traditionelle und kritische Theorie, Frankfurt/ Main: Fischer. See for the method of Critical Theory also Adorno, Theodor W. (ed.) (1980) Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie, Darmstadt: Luchterhand. Cf. for the connection between positivism and reification today Meisner, Lukas (2023) Liquid Reification. A conceptual update in Lukács’ Spirit, in Jahrbuch der internationalen Lukács-Gesellschaft, 19, pp. 113-126.

[iv]Horkheimer, Max (1992) Traditionelle und kritische Theorie, Frankfurt/ Main: Fischer, p. 244, footnote.

[v]For a Critical-Theory-inspired critique of the ideology of TINA (‘There Is No Alternative’) as it is well-known from the technocratic governing of neoliberal post-politics, see f.e. Fisher, Mark (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is there no Alternative?, Winchester/ Washington: zero books.

[vi]For a brief introduction to Critical Theory and the problematic history of the Frankfurt School, see also Meisner, Lukas (2023) Vom Klassenkampf zur Zivilisationskritik, at Jacobin, online at https://www.jacobin.de/artikel/vom-klassenkampf-zur-zivilisationskritik-frankfurter-schule-kritische-theorie-lukas-meisner.

[vii]Cf. Honneth, Axel (2002) Idiosynkrasie als Erkenntnismittel. Gesellschaftskritik im Zeitalter des normalisierten Intellektuellen, in Honneth, Axel (2007) Pathologien der Vernunft. Geschichte und Gegenwart der Kritischen Theorie, Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 219-234, here p. 222: “Ein soziales Reservoir für eine Form der Kritik, die hinter die Prämissen der öffentlich akzeptierten Problembeschreibungen zurückfragt, ist in der Schicht der Intellektuellen kaum mehr anzutreffen.”

[viii]For respective analyses, see Luxemburg, Rosa (1970) Die Akkumulation des Kapitals. Ein Beitrag zur ökonomischen Erklärung des Imperialismus, Frankfurt/ Main: Verlag Neue Kritik; Wallerstein, Immanuel (2004) World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction, Durham: Duke University Press; Dörre, Klaus (2009) Die neue Landnahme. Dynamiken und Grenzen des Finanzmarktkapitalismus, in Dörre, Klaus; Lessenich, Stephan; Rosa, Hartmut (2017) Soziologie – Kapitalismus – Kritik. Eine Debatte, Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 21-86.

[ix]For this interpretation in much detail, see Meisner, Lukas (2025 forthcoming) Critical Marxist Theory. Political Autonomy and the Radicalising Project of Modernity, New York: Palgrave.

[x]Horkheimer, Max; Adorno, Theodor W. (2013) Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente, Frankfurt/ Main: Fischer, p. 145: „Dem Arbeitsvorgang in Fabrik und Büro ist auszuweichen nur in der Angleichung an ihn in der Muße.“

[xi]Cf., generally, Adorno, Theodor W. (2021) Erziehung zur Mündigkeit Vorträge und Gespräche mit Hellmut Becker 1959 bis 1969, Berlin: Suhrkamp.  

[xii]For this argument, see Meisner, Lukas (2024) Für eine Dialektik von Marx und Marxismus: Den Postmarxismus widerlegen, in Jahrbuch für marxistische Gesellschaftstheorie, 3, pp. 173-180.

[xiii]This dialectic may also be called a co-dependence. After all, without people buying at least a large quantity of abundant commodities, their production could not become profitable (since there would be no return); and without production for its own sake (that is, for the sake of profit instead of satisfaction of needs), consumerism could have never developed.

[xiv]See on this point also Böhme, Gernot (2018) Ästhetischer Kapitalismus, Berlin: Suhrkamp. For a transcapitalist critique of core culture industries like advertisement and fashion, see Meisner, Lukas (2023) Medienkritik ist links. Warum wir eine medienkritische Linke brauchen, Berlin: Das Neue Berlin, pp. 127 ff.

[xv]In classical Marxist ideology-theory, the world is determined by economic developments, including the spheres of culture, politics, or private life – which are summarised in the term ‘superstructure’. From newer Marxisms, this dualist understanding in which the economic base determines the ideological superstructure were replaced with an understanding of capitalism as an ideological infrastructure or totality comprising both the economy and culture. On the historical collapse of culture in the economy in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, see Meisner, Lukas (2021) The Political Economy of Postmodernism and the Spirit of Post-Bourgeois Capitalism, in &&&Journal. The New Centre for Research & Practice, online, as well as the introduction to Walter, Theresa; Meisner, Lukas (eds.) (2020) Avantgarden vom Kopf auf die Füße gestellt. Kritik an Kunst vs. Künstlerkritik, Berlin: HU Press.

[xvi]Marcuse, Herbert (1972) Counterrevolution and Revolt, Boston: Beacon Press, p. 3.

[xvii]See on the concept f.e. Ritzer, George; Jurgenson, Nathan (2010) Production, Consumption, Prosumption, in Journal of Consumer Culture, 10:1, pp. 13-36.

[xviii]See, on this point, f.e. Deleuze, Gilles (1992) Postscript on the Societies of Control, in October, 59, pp. 3-7. 

[xix] Cf. Han, Byung-Chul (2014) Psychopolitik. Neoliberalismus und die neuen Machttechniken, Frankfurt/ Main: Fischer.

[xx] For an up-to-date conceptualisation of the term alienation, see Meisner, Lukas (2022) Objective Alienation. No essentialism, nowhere, in Berlin Journal of Critical Theory, 6:3, pp. 95-134.

[xxi]Cf. on this point for an ecological argument Meisner, Lukas (2023) Wir müssen mehr leisten – für die Erhaltung unserer Lebensgrundlagen, in Wirtschaftswoche, Handelsblatt, online and printed, 28/1/2023.

[xxii]Celikates, Robin; Jaeggi, Rahel; Loick, Daniel; Schmidt, Christian (2023) 11 Theses on Needs, online at KTB, https://criticaltheoryinberlin.de/interventions/11-theses-on-needs/.