Bloomsbury Marx, Adorno, and the Critique of Labour: Individuality in the Age of Surplus Populations (Critical Theory and the Critique of Society)

Addressing the contradictions inherent in the social form of capitalist labour which dominates society today, Fabian Arzuaga outlines the complex relationship between individualism and labour. By reconstructing critical theory as the critique of political economy in the work of Theodor W. Adorno and Karl Marx, Arzuaga reveals the tension in the system which leads to the loss of individualism, at the same time as it lays the foundations for emancipation from it. Joining up the work of Marx and Adorno in this way illuminates and speaks to current debates around universal basic income, automation, surplus populations, and the growing interest in post-work imaginaries. By outlining the temporal logic of capital, the means of social reproduction that hinge on the unlimited creation of surplus value, are challenged and brought into question. From this base, a post-work society in which labour in its prevailing social form is abolished, is imagined and made possible. In this society, the means of subsistence would no longer be tied to labour and the promise of individuality could be redeemed for what Marx termed the ‘social individual’. Instead of simply being an ideological tool of liberalism, ‘individuality’ in Arzuaga’s formulation becomes its own critical category—able to grasp the present while radically pointing beyond itself.