ABSTRACT
The discussion of Marx's thought characterized every phase of Theodor W. Adorno's philosophical itinerary: from his early conference on the Actuality of Philosophy, in which he employed the Marxian analysis of commodity as a grounding paradigm for his theoretical remarks, to the considerations he made in 1968, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Marx's birth. My aim is to highlight one particular aspect of Adorno's references to Marx: his reflections on the Marxian theory of classes and capitalism. I will delimit my field of analysis by focusing on two writings in which, with no doubt, Adorno's engagement with Marx's thought reaches its highest point. These writings date back to very different, although equally crucial, times in the history of critical theory: the first text, titled Reflections on Class Theory, was written in 1942 and published posthumously in the collection Soziologische Schriften; 1 the second was presented in 1968 as a keynote lecture to the sixteenth Congress of the German Sociological Society; on that occasion Adorno engaged himself with the question: Late Capitalism or Industrial Society? 2 He presented this text also at the famous conference on Marx which took place in Paris from the 8 to the 10 May 1968 (a crucial time and place) with the title Is Marx Obsolete? 3 In performing a comparison between the writing from 1942 and the text from 1968, I also aim at highlighting, on the one hand, the permanent features of Adorno's reflections on Marxian social theory, and, on the other hand, the changes that intervened over the years in his theoretical stance.
