Adorno and Marx: The end of ideology critique in the era of culture industry

Abstract

This article reconstructs Adorno's engagement with Marx not as a retreat into cultural criticism, but as immanent critique – a transformative actualization of Marxian categories under late capitalism. It identifies four commitments Adorno both inherits from Marx and reworks: human beings as historically formed ensembles of social relations, alienation as a social pathology, the persistence of class antagonism despite waning class consciousness, and ideology as materially rooted misrecognition embedded in social practices. Late capitalist forms of domination are reproduced less by legitimation than by standardized cultural forms that discipline perception, desire, and judgment, rendering conformity "rational" and alternatives unintelligible. Ideology as doctrine becomes ideology as integration, supplementing the theoretical primacy of economic compulsion with the notion of a necessary subjective "surplus" to stabilize a society whose promises contradict experience.