Postone and Adorno’s Two Materialist Orientations of Dialectics

Introduction

引 论

In his seminal work *Time, Labor, and Social Domination*, Moishe Postone argues that Marx’s mature concept of labor is not the Hegelian process of labor alienation, but rather a historically specific form of labor (alienation). This specific form of labor (alienation) in the capitalist era’s “form of alienation” differs essentially from Hegel’s dialectical labor based on handicraft production. The former points to a “return” of the subject to itself via the object, while the latter points to an objective force that transcends the conscious subject; this objective force will become a new “subject,” thereby generating a new, differently configured socialized subject — capital — and its peculiar dialectical laws of motion.

普殊同（Moishe Postone）在他的成名作《时间、劳动与社会统治》中指出：马克思成熟时期的劳动概念并非是黑格尔意义上的劳动异化过程，而是一种历史特定阶段的劳动（异化）。这种特定的劳动（异化）在资本主义时代的“异化形式”与黑格尔基于手工生产的辩证法的劳动，存在本质性不同。前者指向了一种主体经由客体最终返回自身的“复归”，而后者则指向了一种超越意识主体的客观性力量，这种客观性力量将成为一个新的“主体”，并由此产生一种新的、不同形态的社会化主体——资本，及其特有的辩证运动规律。

This article argues that Postone’s thesis inherits Lukács’s theoretical aim — a materialist turn of Hegelian dialectics — and echoes Lukács’s self-criticism in the 1960s. In the 1967 new preface to *History and Class Consciousness*, Lukács admitted that his 1923 claim that the proletariat is the “identical subject-object” that creates human history “was not a materialist realization that overcomes the idealist system, but an attempt that is more Hegelian than Hegel himself.” Postone’s analysis of the concept of labor here engages in a theoretical interaction with Lukács’s self-criticism. In his view, the reason Lukács adopted this line of thought (the proletariat as historical subject) is that, following the path of Hegel’s dialectic of labor, he regarded the proletariat as the subject of commodity production (and hence of value production), and consequently as the historical subject that overcomes, through practice, the commodity structure and its ideological predicament (the antinomies of bourgeois thought). Postone argues that this view is not only fundamentally different from Marx’s later thinking, but also set a wrong theoretical direction for the subsequent development of critical theory. However, in his view, Lukács did succeed in grasping the key element of “the domination of abstract labor”; it is just that Lukács tried to epistemologize it in the dance of the “dialectic of consciousness,” thereby missing the “affirmative dialectic” that penetrates the deep social structure of capitalism’s historical specificity.

本文认为，普殊同的论断承继了卢卡奇的理论目标——对黑格尔辩证法进行唯物主义转向，并与后者20世纪60年代的自我批评遥相呼应。在1967年《历史与阶级意识》的新版序言中，卢卡奇承认，1923年他提出将无产阶级视为创造人类历史的“主客同一体”的这一主张，“并不是一种克服唯心主义体系的唯物主义实现，而是一种比黑格尔更加黑格尔的尝试”。而普殊同对劳动概念的分析在此与卢卡奇的自我批评存在一种理论的互动。在他看来，卢卡奇之所以采取这一思路（无产阶级作为历史主体），原因在于他沿着黑格尔劳动辩证法的思路，将无产阶级视作商品生产（继而是价值生产）的主体，继而也是以实践方式，克服商品结构及其意识形态困境（资产阶级思想二律背反）的历史主体。普殊同认为，这一观点不仅截然不同于马克思晚年的思路，还为批判理论之后的发展确立了错误的理论方向。不过在他看来，卢卡奇还是成功抓住了“抽象劳动的统治”这一关键要素，只是卢卡奇试图在“意识辩证法”的舞蹈中，将之认识论化，由此错失了深入资本主义历史特殊性的社会深层结构中的“肯定的辩证法”。

In short, Postone reduces Lukács’s totality dialectic to a dialectic dependent on “ontology,” and thereby explains why it falls back into the rut of idealism. Since Lukács, with reference to Hegel, placed the objectified form of concrete labor at the center of his thinking, he consequently “naturally” placed the performer of concrete labor — the worker — in the subject position of the objectification process. Therefore, the class consciousness of the “proletariat” is set by Lukács as both the starting point and the endpoint of the dialectical movement: on the one hand, unlike the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, due to its actual situation, can “recognize” its constantly reifying self in objectifying activity, and can further understand, through the process of commodification (of labor power), the inherent contradictions and paradoxes of capitalist production within the overall cycle of production. Hence, the labor subject that has shaken off its self-objectification — the proletariat — can recognize its subjectivity (as the true creator of the reified society) at a truly totalizing height, and thereby spontaneously tear through the fog of reification to become a spontaneous revolutionary force. But on the other hand, in concrete party politics, Lukács argued that the class consciousness derived from this labor epistemology is not purely spontaneous; it still needs to be “ascribed” from outside, thereby displacing the moving subject of the dialectical process that generates class consciousness from the worker to the party. Thus, an unbridgeable gap appears between the “standpoint of the proletariat” in *History and Class Consciousness* and the many political essays collected in it. From Postone’s perspective, Lukács’s above difficulty is understandable, because the concept of “labor” he relies on only unfolds a critique of fetishism, confined to the realm of subjective consciousness. Therefore, in actual political struggle, Lukács’s totality dialectic, “at its worst,” means that the proletariat existing as labor power only develops a “trade union” consciousness, while “at its best,” it merely means that workers recognize themselves as the law of production of surplus value, thereby developing into a “distributive communism.” In other words, Lukács’s contradictory attitude toward class consciousness in theory and practice, and between mass spontaneity and political interventionism, is fundamentally constrained by his establishment of a transhistorical “labor” as the center of his thinking, and consequently his establishment of the proletariat as the labor subject as the revolutionary subject of emancipation. To truly respond to Lukács’s idealist error and reorient dialectics materialistically, the key lies in understanding the specific form of labor in capitalist society and the real laws and subjects within its movement of production.

要言之，普殊同对将卢卡奇的总体性辩证法，归纳为一种依赖于“本体论”的辩证法，并由此解释其为何重新陷入唯心主义窠臼。既然卢卡奇参照黑格尔，将具体劳动这种对象化形式放在了思考的中心位置，继而也将具体劳动的施行者——工人“天然”置于对象化过程的主体位置上。因此“无产阶级”的阶级意识，被卢卡奇设定为了辩证运动的起点与终点：一方面，无产阶级不同于资产阶级，他们因现实处境得以在对象性的活动中“认出”不断物化的自我，也能在对象化的过程中借由商品化（劳动力）的过程，进一步在总体的生产循环中理解资本主义生产内在的矛盾性与悖论性。因此，摆脱了自我客体化的劳动主体——无产阶级，可以在真正总体性高度上认出其主体性(作为物化社会的真正创造者），继而自发地撕破物化迷雾，成为革命的自发性力量。但另一方面，在具体的政党运动中，卢卡奇则主张，上述凭借劳动认识论的阶级意识并非是纯然自发的，仍需从外部“赋予”，继而将生成阶级意识的辩证过程的运动主体从工人置换为了政党。由此，《历史与阶级意识》中“无产阶级的立场”，与收录其中的诸多政论文之间，出现了无法接续的鸿沟。从普殊同的视角看，卢卡奇上述的难题是可以理解的，因为他依赖“劳动”观念展开的仅仅是拜物教批判，局限于主体意识的领域。因此卢卡奇的总体性辩证法在现实政治斗争中，“其最坏的情况”是作为劳动力存在的无产阶级只是产生“工会”意识的发展，而“其最好的情况”，不过是工人认识到自己是剩余价值的生产法则，因而发展为一种“分配的共产主义”。换句话说，卢卡奇对阶级意识在理论与实践、群众自发性与政治干预主义上的矛盾态度，在根本上受制于他将一种超历史性的“劳动”，确立为了思考问题的中心，继而将劳动主体的无产阶级确立为了解放的革命主体。而要真正回应卢卡奇唯心主义式的错误，并重新为辩证法完成唯物主义的定向，其关键在于，理解资本主义社会特有的劳动形式及其生产运动中真正的规律与主体。

I. Affirmative Dialectic: Postone’s Critical Inheritance from Lukács

一、肯定的辩证法：普殊同对卢卡奇的批判性继承

When Lukács, in the “New Preface” to *History and Class Consciousness*, reflected on his own error of equating “alienation = reification = objectification” (the so-called “Lukács thesis”), he had already sensed the difference between Marx and himself on the issue of labor, and thereby attempted to re-establish the connection between Marx’s critique of political economy and dialectics. For Postone, the key to breaking the “Lukács thesis” lies in transforming and reconstructing the field of application of dialectics, so that the social totality of the dialectical method can survive even after a major transformation of its critical theory (the theory of reification). At this point, it is necessary to introduce another of Postone’s claims — replacing the revolutionary subject of the proletariat with the subject of capital, in order to analyze the historical specificity of capitalist society and its emancipatory potential. In Postone’s view, Lukács and the “traditional Marxism” he represents, by placing the reversal of “labor’s subordination to capital” in an overly central position, misread the conceptual definition of the historical specificity of capitalist labor in *Capital*. Postone argues that the historical dialectic in Marx’s mature works “does not originate from the interaction of subject, labor, and nature,” nor “from the reflective work of the subject’s ‘labor’ objectification on itself”; on the contrary, Marx’s historical dialectic is confined within the unique historical contradiction of capitalist society. The basis for this claim comes from Marx’s *Grundrisse* — “Labor is the substance and immanent measure of value, but it itself has no value.” In Postone’s view, Lukács did not realize that “capitalist labor” in Marx’s context is fundamentally different from the Hegelian-Ricardian concrete labor.

当卢卡奇在《历史与阶级意识》“新版序言”中反省自身对“异化=物化=对象化”（即所谓“卢卡奇命题”）的错误时，他实际已经察觉到马克思在劳动问题上与他的不同，并由此试图重新建立马克思政治经济学批判与辩证法的联系。而对普殊同来说，破解“卢卡奇命题”的关键，在于对辩证法的适用领域进行转化与重构，以便在对其批判理论（物化理论）经过重大变革之后依旧存续辩证方法的社会总体性。至此，有必要引出普殊同的另一项主张——以资本主体，取代无产阶级的革命主体，来剖析资本主义社会的历史特殊性及其解放潜能。在普殊同看来，卢卡奇及其代表的“传统马克思主义”，由于将颠倒“劳动对于资本的附属”放在了过于中心的位置上，误读了《资本论》对资本主义劳动的历史特殊性的概念界定。普殊同认为，马克思成熟作品中的历史辩证法，“并不来源于主体、劳动与自然的互动”，“也不来源于主体的‘劳动’对象化对其自身所进行的反思性工作”；相反，马克思的历史辩证法是限定于资本主义社会这个独一无二的历史性矛盾之中的。上述论断的依据来自马克思的《政治经济学批判大纲》 —— “劳动”仅仅是“价值的实体和内在尺度，但是它本身没有价值”。在普殊同看来，卢卡奇没有意识到马克思语境中的“资本主义劳动”，与黑格尔—李嘉图式的具体劳动截然不同。

(1) Capital and Its Form of Social Mediation: A Social Subject-Substance

（一）资本及其社会中介形式：一种社会主体—实体性

Simply put, Postone excavates, outside the fields of philosophy of consciousness or class struggle, the “material substance” that he believes Lukács missed. In his view, to grasp the materiality of this substance does not lie in investigating its objective reality in the epistemological sense, but in understanding how it produces real social effects, or revealing the constructive role and objective efficacy it displays in the deep structure of society. Therefore, from Postone’s perspective, the materialist orientation of dialectics requires transforming material objectivity from an epistemological thesis into a “social epistemological” thesis. And following the line of Hegelian dialectics (truth is both substance and subject), the “social substantiality” of capital must also manifest as “social subjectivity” at the social level. In this respect, capital can be interpreted as the alienated result of human labor, but once capital realizes the laws of its value movement, it becomes a “quasi-independent” substance beyond the control of concrete human labor, even beyond individual cognition. In Postone’s view, endowing capital — this substance produced by human forces but alienated from them — with the status of “subject” is the key step to truly understanding the historical specificity of capitalist society and the (dialectical) laws of motion within its social structure.

简单说，普殊同在意识哲学或阶级斗争以外的领域，挖掘其认为的卢卡奇错失的“物质实体”。在他看来，要把握这种实体的物质性，不在于探究其在认识论意义上的客观实在性，而是要理解它是如何产生现实的社会效应，或揭示它在社会深层结构中展现出的建构作用与客观效力。因此从普殊同的视角看，对辩证法的唯物主义定向，需要将物质客观性从认识论论题转换为“社会认识论”论题。而按照黑格尔式辩证法的思路（真理既是实体，亦是主体），资本的“社会实体性”也需要在社会层面上表现为“社会主体性”。在这一点上，资本可以被解读为人类劳动的异化结果，但一旦资本实现其价值运动的规律，其就成了超出人类具体劳动控制，甚至超出了个体认识之外的“准独立”的实体。在普殊同看来，赋予资本——这一由人类力量产生，但与人类力量相异化的实体——以“主体”地位，是真正理解资本主义社会的历史特殊性，及其社会结构内部的（辩证）运动规律的关键步骤。

First, the key to understanding the dialectic of capital lies in penetrating the sphere of production, not the sphere of market exchange. The core principle of this structural generation depends on the mediation of the value form, which, although it also appears in various different material forms, i.e., the use-values of labor commodities, has as its inner core abstract, supersensible abstract labor time. In other words, the process of commodity production is theoretically the unity of the “labor process” (the process of producing material wealth) and the formation (valorization) of value. On this basis, Postone seizes the inner tension between the accumulation of material wealth and the valorization of value, as well as between concrete labor and abstract labor. First, extending Marx’s analysis of the twofold character of the commodity, Postone extracts the distinction and contradiction between material wealth, whose content is use-value, and value-wealth, whose content is the accumulation of exchange-value. He emphasizes that this contradiction did not exist in traditional societies of the past. In traditional societies, the production of material wealth not only came mainly from human concrete labor but also directly satisfied human consumption needs. In this sense, the “value-wealth” of traditional societies was no different from material wealth. But the historical specificity of capitalist society lies in the fact that, mediated by the “value form” embedded in the commodity, it has developed into a social production system whose real purpose is “value-wealth.” In this system, although commodity production nominally takes as its premise the satisfaction of the material needs of society as a whole (C—M—C), the core driving force of commodity production is the accumulation of value aimed at asset valorization or profit extraction (M—C—M').

第一，理解资本辩证法的关键是深入到生产领域，而非市场的交换领域。这种结构生成的核心原则依赖于价值形式的中介，后者虽然也显现为各种不同的物质形态，即劳动商品的使用价值，但其内核却是抽象的、超感性的抽象劳动时间，换句话说，商品生产过程理论上是“劳动过程”（物质财富的生产过程）和价值形成（增殖）过程的统一体。以此为基准，普殊同抓住了物质财富积累与价值增殖，以及具体劳动与抽象劳动的内在张力。首先，延续马克思对商品二重性的分析，普殊同抓取出以使用价值为内容的物质财富，与交换价值积累为内容的价值财富之间的区分及矛盾。他强调，这一矛盾是以往传统社会不存在的。在传统社会中，物质财富的生产不仅主要来源于人类的具体劳动，而且直接满足人的消费需求。在此意义上，传统社会的“价值财富”与物质财富并无分别。但资本主义社会的历史特殊性，在于它依循商品内嵌的“价值形式”这一中介，发展为了一个以“价值财富”为真实目的社会生产系统。在这个系统中，商品生产虽然在名目上以满足社会整体的物质需要为前提（W—G—W），但驱动商品生产的核心动力乃是价值积累为目标的资产增殖或利润攫取（G—W—G'）。

Second, based on the distinction between the two dimensions of value, Postone reveals the historical specificity of capitalist labor as distinct from direct human labor. Within the structure of capitalist production, the labor process, originally aimed at producing use-values, is no longer an object-oriented activity that transforms material raw materials into use-values but directly becomes the “raw material” for value accumulation. The best example here is precisely Marx’s citation of the novel *Robinson Crusoe*. On the isolated island, Crusoe measures all his specific concrete labor processes by the scale of the labor hours achievable during a day’s waking hours, determining that the value of each labor product depends on the number of hours he has expended on it. Marx brilliantly commented that Crusoe’s island life is merely a microcosm of English society. But only in the capitalist history centered on socialized production could the author of *Robinson Crusoe* and the political economists represented by Smith think about the question of the magnitude of value based on the expenditure of abstract human labor time.

第二，普殊同依据两种价值维度的区分，揭示了资本主义劳动不同于直接人类劳动的历史特殊性。在资本主义生产的结构中，原本以生产使用价值为目标的劳动过程，不再是一种将物质原料转化为使用价值的对象性活动，而是直接成了价值积累的“原料”。这里最佳的例子正是马克思对小说《鲁滨逊漂流记》的引述。鲁滨逊在孤岛上将其所有的具体的劳动过程，依据一天清醒时长中所能达到的劳动小时为尺度，认定每项劳动产品的价值取决于他在其上耗费的小时数。马克思精彩评价道，鲁滨逊的孤岛生活只是英国社会的缩影。但只有在以社会化生产为核心的资本主义历史中，《鲁滨逊漂流记》的作者与斯密为代表的政治经济学家们，才可能依据抽象劳动人类时间的耗费来思考价值量的问题。

Postone reminds us that if we delve into Marx’s “socially necessary labor time” as the benchmark for the magnitude of value, we will find that the “magnitude of value” measured in these units is not some ever-increasing “numerical value” but a “constant.” This effect constitutes a structural dialectical movement. Under social conditions where the working day cannot be prolonged (extracting “absolute surplus value”) (due to reasons such as labor struggle), the accumulation of capital or value can only continue to obtain relative surplus value by means of raising productive forces, reducing necessary labor time (the magnitude of value for workers to restore their capacity for productive labor). Specifically, the production of surplus value (i.e., exploitation) in historical movement occurs more concretely in the change in the ratio between surplus labor time and necessary labor time. When the capital side can no longer crudely prolong labor time (after experiencing legislation and labor strikes), they turn to the ratio within the 8-hour working day (production of “relative surplus value”), i.e., reducing the proportion of necessary labor within the 8 hours. This forces a further increase in productive forces, so that the material wealth needed for workers to restore their own labor power can be produced in a shorter time, achieving the goal of shortening necessary labor time and (within the proportion of the 8-hour working day) expanding surplus labor time in a disguised form. But the wealth effect of economic growth promoted by increased social productive forces is only temporary, because, in the overall picture, material wealth does not occupy a dominant position; material products must be mediated by the value form before they can be represented as “commodities.” In the real market, this manifests as a situation where, after a certain sector improves production efficiency, it can only obtain a premium from efficiency gains by more efficiently producing “commodities for sale” in the initial stage of entering the market. Later, after the large quantity of commodities it produces meets market demand, it will inevitably lose the premium effect. Therefore, from the dimension of total social value, the increase in productive forces brought about by technological progress does not create more wealth in the value dimension (i.e., does not create more total social wealth available for appropriation), although it actually creates more material wealth. From another perspective, in traditional societies, an increase in material wealth would reduce people’s actual “necessary labor time,” but this does not happen in present-day society. On the contrary, in a society pursuing surplus value, the total length of labor time before technological progress is still retained. The only change is that the proportion of capital’s accumulation of value relative to labor increases, and the significance of labor for valorization in the face of technology continuously shrinks, although at the present stage it cannot approach zero. It can be said that, as long as the expenditure of abstract labor time is taken as the criterion for measuring total social value, under the premise of limiting working hours (such as the 8-hour working day), the growth of material wealth brought about by technological and productive force progress can only briefly reach or approach value-wealth. But over time, this economic growth achieved through the rapid accumulation of material wealth can no longer be represented as growth in the value form. Therefore, Postone believes that, at the overall social level, “the continuously growing quantity of material wealth produced by capitalism does not represent a corresponding increase in the level of social wealth in the form of value.”

普殊同提醒我们，倘若深究马克思那里作为价值量基准的“社会必要劳动时间”，就会发现以之为单位的“价值量”，并非是某个不断增长的“数值”，而是一个“常数”。这种效应构成了一种结构性的辩证运动。在无法延长工作日（攫取“绝对剩余价值”）的社会条件下（出于劳工抗争等原因），资本或价值的积累只有通过提升生产力的手段，减少必要劳动时间（工人恢复生产劳动能力的价值量）的方式，才能继续获得相对剩余价值。具体而言，剩余价值的生产（也即剥削），在历史运动中更具体地发生在剩余劳动时间与必要劳动时间的比例变化之中。当资本一方不再能粗暴地延长劳动时间（经历立法和劳动罢工之后），他们转向了8小时劳动内部的比率（“相对剩余价值”生产），即减少8小时内必要劳动的比值，这就迫使生产力进一步提高，以便在更短的时间内生产出工人恢复自身劳动力的物质财富，达到缩短必要劳动时间，（在8小时的劳动占比中）变相地扩大剩余劳动时间的目的。但社会生产力促进的经济增长产生的财富效应仅仅是暂时的，因为在总体上，物质财富并不占据主导地位，物质性的产品必须在价值形式的中介后，方能表征为“商品”。在现实的市场中，这表现为提高生产效率后某个部门只有更高效地产出“待出售的商品”，在投入市场初期才能获得因效率提升的溢价，而之后它生产的大量商品在满足市场需要后，将不得不失去溢价效应。因此，从社会总价值的维度上看，技术进步带来的生产力并没有在价值维度上创造更多财富（即创造更多社会可占有的总财富），虽然它实际创造了更多的物质财富。而从另一个角度看，在传统社会，物质财富的增加将缩减人们实际的“必要劳动时间”，但这件事情并不会在现今的社会中发生。相反，在追求剩余价值的社会中，仍旧保留着技术进步之前的劳动总时长，唯一改变的无非是资本较之劳动对于价值积累的比重增大，劳动在技术面前对价值增殖的意义不断缩小，但后者在现阶段不可能趋近于无。可以说，只要按照抽象劳动时间耗费为社会总价值的考量标准，在限制工作时间的前提下（如8小时工作制），技术和生产力进步带来的物质财富增长只能短暂地达到或趋近价值财富，但随着时间的推移，这种由物质财富快速积累而实现的经济增长无法在价值形式上再度表现为增长。因此，普殊同认为，在社会总体维度上，“资本主义产出的不断增长的物质财富的量，并不代表以价值为形式的社会财富的水平也相应提高”。

Thus we see that the increase in productive forces only continuously approaches the limit of surplus value within a fixed interval (such as the 8-hour working day). As long as bourgeois society cannot strip away necessary labor time, the surplus value extractable per unit of labor day always approaches a “fixed value.” Therefore, the “magnitude of value” generated per unit of time remains a constant. Precisely because of this, in a dynamically competitive society, each production unit is forced to have the impetus and tendency to increase productive forces, but also has to accept the following fact: the greater quantity of material wealth brought about by the progress of productive forces can only bring about a short-term increase in value per unit of time.

于是我们看到，生产力的提升只是在某个固定区间（如8小时工作制）内不断逼近剩余价值的极限，只要资产阶级社会无法剥除必要劳动时间，那么每个单位的劳动日所能攫取的剩余价值，总是趋近一个“固定值”，因此每个单位时间所产生的“价值量”仍然是一个常数。正因如此，在动态竞争的社会中，每个生产单位都被迫有提升生产力的动力和趋势，但也不得不接受如下事实：由生产力进步带来的更大量的物质财富，却只能带来每个单位时间中价值的短期增长。

Why does the above phenomenon occur? Postone attributes it to the “treadmill effect” of production, or directly calls it the “treadmill dialectic.” No matter how fast the treadmill accelerates, the runner on the machine remains in place. Therefore, this metaphor very precisely explains Marx’s passage: “However the productivity of labor may change, and therefore however the quantity of products and the price of individual commodities may change, a working day of a given length always produces the same magnitude of value product.” Postone applies this effect to the analysis of the interactive relationship between material wealth and value-wealth caused by productive forces. As long as the dialectical movement continues, in which “each new level of productive forces is redefined as the benchmark level of the abstract time reference system and becomes a universal coercive norm of society,” then the productive forces that expand material wealth through technological improvement can only increase surplus value in an indirect way.

为何会出现上述现象，普殊同将之归因为生产的“跑步机效应”，或者直接称作“跑步机式的辩证法”。跑步机无论如何加速，机器上的跑者仍然留在原地，因此这个比喻十分精确地解释了马克思这段话：“不论劳动生产率如何变化，从而不论产品量和单个商品的价格如何变化，一定长度的工作日总是表现为相同的价值产品。”而普殊同则将这一效应运用于对生产力导致的物质财富与价值财富之间的互动关系的分析，只要“生产力每到一个新水平，都会被重新规定为抽象时间参照系的基准水平，并成为社会普遍的强迫性规范”的辩证运动继续存在，那么通过技术改良扩大物质财富的生产力，就只能是以间接的方式增加剩余价值。

In the above process, the increase in material wealth must necessarily exceed the increase in surplus value, which inevitably leads to energy waste and natural ecological crises. However, due to the existence of the “treadmill effect,” capitalist society can only ignore various natural or humanistic constraints, “submitting” to the coercive need for value accumulation, continuously raising the efficiency of productive forces in order to constantly obtain the wealth effect of short-term economic growth. For this reason, Postone argues that his preliminary examination of the inner dynamic of capitalism has already shown that alienated capital and its law of value constitute a social, objective coercive force, which is not static but continuously reconstructs itself in history. Under this coercion, producers are forced to cater to the demand for specific material wealth in each era and the technological conditions it provides; they “are not only forced to produce according to an abstract temporal standard, but must produce in a historically appropriate manner.” Thus, the peculiar contradiction of this capitalist world exposes the foundation on which it depends: on the one hand, the dimension of value (capital) and the dimension of material wealth production still manifest a fundamental difference in capitalist production, but on the other hand, “the two are combined into two moments of a single (historically specific) social form. The result is a dynamic interaction in which these two moments re-establish each other in such a way that the difference between them is transformed into a growing opposition.” This opposition leads to an ever-increasing internal structural tension, and as historical time accumulates, the gap between the conditions of production of material wealth and the conditions of production of value will grow ever larger, and its tension will inevitably deepen day by day, until it moves toward self-negation.

在上述过程中，物质财富的增加必然要多于剩余价值的增加，这势必造成能源浪费及自然生态危机，但由于“跑步机效应”的存在，资本主义社会只能无视自然或人文的种种限定，“屈从”于价值积累的强制需要，不断提升生产力的效率，以求不断获得短期的经济增长的财富效应。为此普殊同主张，他对资本主义内在动力的初步考察已经表明，异化的资本及其价值规律，乃是社会性的、客观的强制力，也不是静止的，而是在历史中不断重构自身。在这一强制下，生产者被迫去迎合每个时代对特定物质财富的需求及其提供的技术条件，他们“不仅被迫去按照一个抽象的时间标准来生产，并且必须以一种合于历史的方式来生产”。于是，这种资本主义世界特有的矛盾性，就暴露了它赖以存在的地基：一方面，价值（资本）的维度与物质财富的生产的维度在资本主义生产中依然体现出根本性的差异，但另一方面，“两者被结合成为一种单一的（历史特殊的）社会形式中的两个环节。结果导致了一种动态的互动，其中，这两个环节以如下的方式重新确立了彼此，它们之间的差异转变为成一种不断增长的对立”。这种对立导致了一种不断增长的内在的结构张力，而随着历史时间的不断累积，物质财富的生产条件和价值生产条件之间的差距将越来越大，其张力也势必会日益深重，直至走向自我否定。

(II) The Historical Movement Process of the Dialectic of Capital

（二）资本辩证法的历史运动过程

Beyond theoretical deduction, Postone also conducts a historical examination of the above structural movement process. He points out that the history of capitalism cannot be interpreted in a historical-evolutionary manner; its process of emergence is a non-linear result of (Western European) historical development. However, once the law of value within the category of capital is completed, it completely overturns the old forms of social mediation, and we must assign it a special historical status and mode of investigation. Following Marx’s line of thought in *Capital* and the *Grundrisse*, Postone particularly emphasizes the significance of the “cooperation” adopted by manufacture for the historical development of capitalist society. He argues that when extensive division of labor and cooperation unfold, scattered, atomized individual laborers, in the concrete process of division of labor, have already secretly carried out production in accordance with the requirements of abstract temporal domination. On the one hand, at this point individual laborers or production collectives encounter social total labor in production, which takes the compression of labor time as its standard for wealth accumulation. On the other hand, at the dimension of total social wealth, “value wealth” (which compresses time) and “material wealth” (actually produced after efficiency gains) have already shown an internal divergence—socialized cooperative labor has already treated the production of material wealth (i.e., concrete labor) as a means of accumulating value, not as an end. However, because the process of value accumulation in the manufacture period still directly derives from human subjective labor, value augmentation and material wealth still maintain a high degree of formal unity. But once the period of large-scale machine production is entered, the contradiction between the accumulation of social material wealth and value augmentation becomes manifest. Postone argues that, from the perspective of the laborer, labor activity originating from the human subject no longer manifests the subjectivity of the human will but is completely integrated as a part or tool of machine production, becoming an element indistinguishable from machine elements. Conversely, from the perspective of capital, the laborer who incorporates labor power into capital, as a limb of the working organism, “is itself merely a specific mode of existence of capital.”

在理论推演之外，普殊同还对上述结构化的运动过程进行了历史考察。他指出，资本主义的历史不能以一种历史进化论的方式来解读，其兴起的过程乃是（西欧）历史发展的一个非线性结果。然而，一旦资本范畴内的价值规律得以完成，它就完全颠覆了旧有的社会中介形式，我们必须赋予其一种特殊性的历史地位与考察方式。普殊同依循马克思《资本论》与《政治经济学批判大纲》的写作思路，特别强调工场手工业所采取的“协作”对于资本主义社会历史发展的意义。他认为，当广泛的分工协作展开时，零散的、原子化的个体劳动者在具体的分工过程中，已经暗自依循抽象时间统治的要求开展生产。一方面，此时个体的劳动者或生产集体，在生产中遭遇了作为社会的总体劳动，后者以压缩劳动时间为其财富积累的标准。另一方面，在社会总体财富维度上，压缩时间的“价值财富”与提升效率后实际生产的“物质财富”，已经出现了内在分野——社会化的协作性劳动，已将物质财富的生产（即具体劳动）视作一种积累价值的手段，而非目的。但是，由于工场手工业时期的价值积累过程仍直接来源于人类的主体性劳动，因此价值增殖与物质财富在形式上仍然保持高度统一。但一旦进入工业大机器生产时期，社会物质财富的积累与价值增殖的矛盾就体现了出来。普殊同认为，从劳动者的视角看去，源于人类主体的劳动活动，在此不再彰显人类意志的主体性，而是彻底融为机器生产的零件或工具，成为了与机器要素无异的要素。反而从资本的视角看，将劳动力并入资本的劳动者，其作为工作有机体的肢体，“本身只不过是资本存在的一种特定方式”。

Therefore, the full deployment of large-scale machine production is both the sign of the dialectic of capital transcending human consciousness rooted in human labor and achieving its self-subjectivization, and the process of truly internalizing human labor into capital’s self-augmentation; but objectively, although the accumulation and growth of value wealth potentially shed the appearance of social material wealth, in the sense of social reality, it requires formal unity with the latter. Simply put, the law of capital’s augmentation must always be unified with economic growth in the sense of material productive forces. For this reason, Postone, drawing on Marx’s viewpoint, concludes that the core contradiction of large-scale industrial capitalism lies precisely in the fact that it must simultaneously construct the process of value augmentation as a historically concrete moment of the material labor process. This inevitably leads to a compulsion manifested as the constant raising of productive forces and the enhancement of social production efficiency—a compulsion that constantly pursues progress in productive forces, thereby triggering ecological crises such as resource waste, as well as social crises such as polarization between rich and poor, class conflict, labor hollowing-out, and fragmentation.

因此，工业大机器生产的全面铺开，既是资本辩证法超脱以人类劳动为根基的人类意识，实现自我主体化的标志，也是将人类劳动真正内化于资本自我增殖的过程；但客观上，价值财富的积累与增长，虽然潜在地摆脱了社会物质财富的外观，却在社会现实的意义上，要求与后者在形式上形成统一。简单地说，资本的增殖规律总是要与物质生产力意义上的经济增长相统一。为此，普殊同依据马克思观点得出，大工业的资本主义的核心矛盾正是在于，它必须将价值的增殖过程同时建构为一个历史具体时刻中的物质劳动过程，这就势必导致了一种表现为不断提升生产力、提升社会生产效率的强制，一种不断追求生产力进步，继而触发资源浪费等生态危机与贫富分化、阶级冲突、劳动空洞化、碎片化等社会危机。

Postone argues that it was precisely in the trajectory of capitalist production changes (from manufacture to large-scale machine production) that Marx, in his later years, clearly delineated the above historical movement process from the unity of concrete labor and abstract labor to their division, with the trend of division continuously expanding. However, Marx’s analysis of this trend not only exposed the dialectical movement at the level of social form (rather than consciousness, and thus merely the class level) but also explored an emancipatory way out at the dimension of production. Marx’s analysis of the trajectory of the capitalist production process also points to the inherent self-negating character of the category of capital as productive force, pointing to the possibility of its self-abolition. But this critical and negative dimension is only possible if, in an affirmative manner, it reveals the objective efficacy and movement laws of the category of capital at the dimension of the value form. In contrast, opposing modes of analysis—such as traditional Marxist class analysis, analytical Marxism’s wealth redistribution, or the Frankfurt School’s “social relations of domination”—all fail to hit the mark and penetrate the dialectical movement process within the deep structure of capitalist society.

普殊同认为，马克思晚年正是在资本主义生产变迁的轨迹中（从工场手工业到大机器生产），清晰地给出了上述从具体劳动与抽象劳动的统一走向分裂，且分裂趋势不断扩大的历史运动过程。但马克思对这一趋势的分析不仅揭露了社会形式层面（而非意识进而仅仅是阶级层面）的辩证运动，而且在生产的维度上探索了解放性的出路。马克思对资本主义生产过程轨迹的分析，也指向了作为生产力的资本范畴其内在的自我否定性，指向了其自我废除的可能性。但这一批判性与否定性维度，只有以肯定的方式，揭示出资本范畴在价值形式维度上的客观效力与运动规律，才是得以可能的。而与之相对立的分析方式——如传统马克思主义的阶级分析，分析马克思主义的财富再分配，或是法兰克福学派主张的“社会统治关系”，都未能切中肯綮，深入资本主义社会深层结构中的辩证运动过程。

(III) Postone’s Critical Inheritance of Lukács

（三）普殊同对卢卡奇批判性继承

Returning to the commonalities and differences between Lukács and Postone. From the perspective of individual cognition, the dialectical movement with capital as the social subject forms, in the sphere of production, a Lukácsian “second nature”—an abstract domination collectively constructed by human individuals and continuously maintained by each individual’s value. It is in this sense that Postone, like Lukács, holds that the commodity category can only be fully grasped in bourgeois society. But unlike Lukács, he argues that the commodity’s coercion of the individual does not depend on the fetishistic illusion formed in consciousness; rather, it constructs a “quasi-independent” system outside social consciousness. In other words, the dialectic of capital, which encompasses the commodity category, is by no means some illusion of consciousness but the deep-seated law of operation of society. Therefore, merely re-establishing the class consciousness of the proletariat, as Lukács does, cannot comprehend its coercive force. In fact, Postone believes that the completed form of this dialectical law was described by Marx in the form of the value form and its laws in Volume 1 of *Capital*. Previous interpretive models focusing on the “commodity fetishism” of *Capital*, because they failed to distinguish the historical specificity of capitalist labor from traditional conceptions of labor, have either equated the contradictory movement occurring in the sphere of production simply with class contradictions in the sense of property ownership, or have translated it philosophically into a rationalist epistemological crisis (Lukács).

回到卢卡奇与普殊同的共通与差异之处。从个体认知的视角看，以资本为社会化主体的辩证法运动，在生产领域中形成了一个卢卡奇式的“第二自然” ——其由人类个体集体建构的，且不断由每个个体价值维持的抽象统治。也在这个意义上，普殊同与卢卡奇一样，认为商品范畴只有在资产阶级社会中才能被完全把握。但与卢卡奇不同的是，他主张商品指向对个体的强制，并不依赖于其在意识上形成的拜物教幻觉，而是在社会意识之外，构建起了一个“准独立”系统。换言之，囊括商品范畴的资本辩证法，绝非是某种意识的幻象，而是社会深层的运作规律。因此，如卢卡奇那样仅仅重新确立无产阶级的阶级意识，并不能理解其强制效力。事实上，普殊同认为，这一辩证规律的完成形态，被马克思以《资本论》第1卷价值形式及其规律的方式描述出来。而以往对《资本论》的侧重“商品拜物教”的解读模式，由于未能将资本主义劳动的历史特殊性与以往传统的劳动观念区分开来，致使他们将生产领域内发生的矛盾运动，简单地等同于财产所有权意义上的阶级矛盾，或是将之以哲学的方式转译为理性主义的认识论危机（卢卡奇）。

It is precisely on the basis of the capital-value form, the social subject of this form of social mediation, that Postone believes he has dismantled the subject-object dialectic of Lukács’s “class consciousness,” and thereby rescued the materialist orientation of Marxism from the subjective theory of Western Marxism. In his view, whether it is Lukács, the author of *History and Class Consciousness*, or the later critical theory of Adorno and Horkheimer, both fall into the rut of a subjective theory: they elaborate a subjective subject-object dialectic by drawing on Hegel’s metaphysical interpretation of the concept of labor in the *Phenomenology of Spirit*. In contrast, Postone, by reinterpreting Marx’s critique of political economy, aims to dismantle this labor-subjectivity theory and reconstruct the explanatory power of Marx’s theory on a social dimension. “In *Capital*, Marx attempts to analyze capitalism in terms of a developed dialectic that is independent of individual will and therefore presents itself as a logic.” Although this dialectical logic is “constituted by practice,” it exists “in a quasi-independent manner.” Here, Postone implies that cognition of this logic itself does not change the nature of these relations, because within Marx’s analytical framework, this developed logic is ultimately the product of the specific historical moment of capitalist society, rather than a continuation of the dialectical movement of previous human societies.

正是基于资本—价值形式，这一社会中介形式的社会主体，普殊同认为他瓦解了卢卡奇“阶级意识”的主—客辩证法意涵，继而将马克思主义的唯物主义定向从西方马克思主义的主体性理论中拯救出来。在他看来，无论是《历史与阶级意识》的作者卢卡奇，还是之后阿多诺、霍克海默的批判理论，都陷入一种主体性理论的窠臼之中：他们借助黑格尔《精神现象学》对劳动概念的形而上学解读，阐发了一种主体性的主—客辩证法。相反，普殊同借助对马克思政治经济学批判的重新阐释，旨在瓦解这种劳动—主体性理论，并在社会维度上重新建构马克思学说的解释效力。“在《资本论》中，马克思试图依据一种发展的辩证法来分析资本主义，这种辩证法独立于个人意志，并因此将自己表现为一种逻辑”，这种辩证逻辑虽然是“由实践所建构”，却是“以准独立的方式存在”。普殊同在这里暗示，对这种逻辑本身的认知并未能改变这些关系的性质，因为在马克思的分析框架中，这种发展了的逻辑最终是资本主义社会这个特殊历史时刻的产物，而非延续了以往其他人类社会的辩证运动过程。

It is not difficult to see that Postone adopts a “critical inheritance” of Lukács, thereby constructing a materialist dialectic of the logic of capital, in order to free materialist dialectics from Hegel’s model of labor and elevate it into a form of social mediation distinct from the relationship between humans and nature and the objectification process it produces. This point seems to echo Lukács’s reflection in his “Preface to the New Edition.” Lukács believed that because he “emphasized the secular basis of Hegel’s economic and social dialectic, which stands in direct opposition to the transcendentalism of various types of subjective idealism,” he defined the formula “objectification = alienation = reification” as follows: “Alienation is regarded neither as ‘a structure of thought’ nor as a ‘blameworthy’ reality, but is defined as ‘the directly given form of existence,’ in which existing things exist in a way that overcomes themselves in the historical process… The most important significance of the above thought is that it maximally expresses a demand: to undertake a new critique, so as to find a clear direction that connects it with Marx’s *Critique of Political Economy*. Once I obtained a clear and fundamental understanding of the errors in the entire content of *History and Class Consciousness*, this search turned into a concrete research plan, namely, to examine the philosophical connection between economics and dialectics.”

不难看出，普殊同对卢卡奇采取了一种“批判性继承”，并由此构建了一种资本逻辑的唯物辩证法，以便将唯物辩证法从黑格尔的劳动模型中解脱出来，上升为一种不同于人与自然关系及其产生的对象化过程的社会中介形式。这一点似乎与卢卡奇在“新版序言”中的反思呼应了起来。卢卡奇认为，他因为“强调了黑格尔的经济和社会辩证法的世俗基础，这种辩证法与各种类型的主观唯心主义的先验论正相反对”，为此他就“对象化=异化=物化”的公式给出了界定：“异化既不是被看作‘一种思想的结构’，也不是被视为一种‘应受到指责的’现实，而是被规定为‘直接既定的存在形式’，在其中，现存事物以在历史过程中克服其自身的方式而存在……上述思想最重要的意义在于，它最大限度地表现出了这样一种要求：要从事一种新的批判，从而寻找一个明确的方向，使之与马克思的《政治经济学批判》沟通起来。一旦我对《历史与阶级意识》整个内容的错误之处获得了一种清晰的、根本的认识，这种寻找就变为一个具体的研究计划，即要对经济学与辩证法之间的哲学联系作出考察。”

We can see that the alliance between dialectics and political economy mentioned in Lukács’s “self-criticism” has been completed by Postone in a more complex way — completely abandoning the “materialism-idealism” in the sense of philosophy of consciousness and exposing the unique social subject-substance of capitalist society. Regarding the “materialist orientation” of dialectics proposed in this article, Postone aims to establish the materialist orientation of dialectics by means of a supra-conscious “subject-substance,” namely the category of capital in the sense of social mediation. This new dialectics “no longer requires, as Lukács did, a ‘materialist,’ anthropological inversion of Hegel’s idealist dialectics. On the contrary, in a certain sense, it is a materialist ‘defense’ of this dialectics.”

我们看到，卢卡奇“自我批评”中提及的辩证法与政治经济学的联盟，被普殊同以一种更为复杂的方式完成了——彻底放弃意识哲学意义上的“唯物—唯心主义”，并揭露资本主义社会独有的社会主体—实体。就本文提出的辩证法的“唯物主义定向”而言，普殊同旨在借助一个超意识的“主体—实体”，即社会中介意义上的资本范畴，奠定辩证法的唯物主义定向。而这一新的辩证法“并不再需要像卢卡奇那样对黑格尔的唯心主义辩证法进行‘唯物主义的’、人类学的颠倒。相反，在某种意义上，它是这种辩证法的唯物主义的‘辩护’”。

II. Misreading and Collision: A Defense of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics

二、误读与碰撞：为阿多诺的否定辩证法辩护

Postone, by strengthening the conceptual distinction regarding “labor” in the (mature) Marx — delineating the fundamental difference between the abstract labor of capitalism (i.e., the value form) and labor in general — replaces a “linear” historical evolutionism. In Postone’s view, the argumentative basis of linear historical logic lies in human activity based on “labor.” Subsequent critical theory, like Lukács and Hegel, failed to escape the influence of this methodology. Postone points out that the “one-dimensional” instrumental labor in Horkheimer and Adorno belongs to the capitalist mode of production (and its historical stage) and differs from labor in general (a concrete, material labor involving technology and industrial level), thus requiring a distinctly different mode of analysis. But precisely because they, together with Lukács, fell into the “illusion” of philosophy of consciousness, critical theory failed to find appropriate critical resources within the framework of political economy, thereby falling into a pessimistic mood of liberation, of which Adorno is a representative.

普殊同通过强化（成熟）马克思那里对于“劳动”概念性的区分——勾勒出资本主义的抽象劳动（即价值形式）与劳动一般的根本区别——来取代一种“线性的”历史进化论。在普殊同看来，线性的历史逻辑的论证基础，乃是在以“劳动”为基础的人类活动之中。而随后的批判理论，与卢卡奇、黑格尔一样未能摆脱这一方法论的影响。普殊同指出，霍克海默与阿多诺那里“单向度”的工具性劳动都属于资本主义生产方式（及其历史阶段），其与劳动一般（一种具体的、物质性的、牵连技术和工业水平的劳动）不同，应采取截然不同的分析方式。但正是由于他们与卢卡奇一同陷入了意识哲学的“幻想”之中，因此批判理论未能在政治经济学的框架下找到合适的批判资源，从而陷入了一种解放的悲观主义情绪，其中代表就有阿多诺。

However, this article argues that Postone’s critique of Adorno is overly simplistic and underestimates their common ground.

但本文认为，普殊同对阿多诺的批判过于简单，低估了彼此的共通之处。

First, the critical theory represented by Adorno confronts late capitalism, which differs from the era of Marx and Lukács. A dialectics of the “category of capital” that relies solely on “the domination of time” and its “value form,” and that approaches the developmental trends of late capitalism only from the economic dimension, cannot understand its dynamic, contingently constituted complex structure of domination. Postone’s definition of capitalist labor remains a “ideal type of labor” in the Weberian sense, but the latter, in the direction of complex state politics and technological development, can hardly avoid various complex deformations, deviating from its originally assumed trajectory in theoretical conception. Although the core driving force of late capitalism, which has produced the culture industry and social control, can be traced back to the so-called “deep structure” of capitalist society, how it unifies with social labor and the social order it requires still needs to return to issues such as the ideological control mechanisms controlled by social groups. When we use ideal-typical theoretical analysis (abstract labor time or the dialectics of capital) to explore the operational mechanisms of the principle of totality in life, we must inevitably examine the concrete forms of labor, social organizational structures, and ideologies that envelop the principle of abstract labor.

首先，以阿多诺为代表的批判理论，面对的是不同于马克思与卢卡奇之时的晚期资本主义，仅仅依托“时间统治”及其“价值形式”展开的“资本范畴”的辩证法，仅仅从经济的维度切入晚期资本主义发展的趋势，无法理解其动态的、偶然促成的复杂统治结构。普殊同对资本主义劳动的界定，仍是一种韦伯意义上“理想型劳动”，但后者在复杂的国家政治与技术发展的方向上，很难不经历各种复杂的变形，偏离其原本在理论设想中的运动轨迹。造成如今文化工业与社会操控的晚期资本主义，其核心的动力来源虽然可以指向所谓资本主义社会的“深层结构”，但如何与社会劳动及其所需的社会秩序相统一，仍需要回到社会集团把持的意识形态操控机制等议题上。当我们以理想型的理论分析（抽象劳动时间或资本的辩证法）探究生活中占据总体性原则的运作机制时，必然要探讨包裹着抽象劳动原则的具体劳动形式、社会组织结构及其意识形态。

Postone obviously agrees with this point as well, stating:

普殊同显然也认同这一点，他为此说道：

“Thus far, I have analyzed the specific, abstract social dimension of capitalist labor as a form of social mediation. This dimension should not be conflated with the social character of labor as a productive activity. In Marx’s view, the latter (the social character of productive activity) includes the social organization of the production process, the average skill of the laboring population, the level of development, and the application of science, etc. This dimension — as the social character of productive activity — has so far remained outside my consideration; the labor I have analyzed as a form of social mediation functions independently of the specific concrete labor in which it is carried out. However, these two social dimensions of capitalist labor are not unrelated.”

迄今，我已经分析了资本主义劳动作为一种社会中介活动的特殊的、抽象的社会维度。这一维度不应被混同于劳动作为一种生产性活动所具有的社会性质。在马克思看来，后者（生产性活动的社会性质）包括了生产过程的社会组织、劳动人口的平均技能、发展水平以及科学的应用等。这一维度——作为生产性活动的社会性质——至今在我的思考范围之外；我所分析的作为一种社会中介活动的劳动，其作用是独立于其所进行的特定的具体劳动的。但是，资本主义劳动的这两个社会维度不是没有关系的。

Therefore, the results of Postone’s critical inheritance of Lukács can be translated into the “abstract domination” in the sense of natural laws rediscovered through Lukács’s concept of reification, namely, the “abstract domination of time” that Postone proposes through the category of capital. It should be recognized that Adorno also inherited Lukács’s legacy on the other side: the abstract domination of time is not merely a “natural law” suspended over all individuals, because beneath this natural law, behind all seemingly neutral and indifferent phenomena of reification, there still surges control and struggle between people, and a subject-object dialectics that penetrates consciousness and the soul — although this element is often dismissed as a kind of “romanticism.” But it is precisely these romantic elements that reintroduce acting individuals into historical movement, rather than dissolving them into specific economic (and power) structures.

因此，普殊同对卢卡奇的批判性继承成果，可以转译为经由卢卡奇物化概念而重新发掘的自然规律意义上的“抽象统治”，即普殊同经由资本范畴所提出的“时间的抽象统治”。理应看到，阿多诺也在另一端继承了卢卡奇的遗产：时间的抽象统治并非只是悬在所有个体之上发挥作用的“自然规律”，因为在这一自然规律之下，一切看似中立、冷漠的物化现象背后，仍涌动着人与人之间的控制与斗争，有着深入意识与灵魂的主—客辩证法——虽然这一要素往往被贬低为一种“浪漫主义”。但正是这些浪漫主义的因素，重新将行动的个体引入历史运动，而非消散于特定的经济（以及权力）结构之中。

Secondly, although Adorno’s “negative dialectics” is criticized for its abstraction and obscurity, its core aim remains clear: negative dialectics seeks to examine the theoretical limits of dialectics itself, rather than falling into the rut of some specific form of dialectics. From Postone’s perspective, on the one hand, the “class consciousness” that Lukács in 1923 expected to be aroused through a “quality-quantity” dialectics was a romanticized imagination, a theoretical conception embedded in the possibility of human labor. On the other hand, however, Lukács also, within the methodology of organization, contemplated a “revolutionary dialectics” applied to concrete party struggle and the mass line, thereby more genuinely exploring a possibility of optimism for social transformation. In contrast, Adorno likewise did not deny that late capitalism possesses internal contradictions in social totality; indeed, through cases such as the culture industry, he emphasized the structural conflicts and antagonisms of the social whole, and why these are ideologically suppressed by conditions such as the culture industry and consumerism. From this perspective, the materialist character of the subject-object dialectics modeled on “labor” is by no means because they are a one-sided reflection of social material production in thought, but rather, in Postone’s sense, a form of social mediation that re-establishes equality and freedom on the dimension of production.

其次，阿多诺的“否定辩证法”虽然因其抽象与晦涩而被诟病，但其核心目标仍然是清晰的：否定的辩证法旨在考察辩证法本身的理论限度，而非陷入某种具体辩证法形态的窠臼之中。从普殊同的视角看，一方面，卢卡奇1923年期待以“质—量”辩证法引起的“阶级意识”是一种浪漫化的想象，是基于内嵌人类劳动可能性之上的理论设想；但另一方面，卢卡奇也在组织的方法论中，思考了一种运用于具体政党斗争与群众路线的“革命辩证法”，更为真切地探讨了一种社会变革的乐观主义可能。与之相对，阿多诺也并非认同晚期资本主义没有社会整体性的内在矛盾，甚至他通过文化工业等案例，强调社会整体的结构性冲突与对抗性，其为何在意识形态的意义上被诸如文化工业、消费主义等条件压制。从这个角度看，以“劳动”为模型的主—客辩证法的唯物主义性质，决然不是因为它们是社会物质生产在思想上的单向度反映，而是普殊同意义上的在生产维度上重新建立平等自由的社会中介形式。

Therefore, Postone and Adorno actually exhibit only a superficial opposition in their views. From a more tolerant perspective, although Adorno’s theoretical breakthrough in “dialectics” inherits the theoretical tradition of Lukács’s Hegelian Marxism, the overall conception of his theory is not thereby rooted in the subject-object dialectics derived from “concrete labor” (i.e., the “pre-capitalist form of labor” that Postone criticizes). In this article’s view, Adorno can not only, from Postone’s perspective, endorse the latter’s new contribution to the “structural” (or foundational) sense of abstract domination in contemporary capitalism, but can also alert us to the potential risks in the development of this theory. In other words, the “materialist aim” of the priority of the object proposed by “negative dialectics” can precisely be applied to the critical work on Postone’s “capital dialectics” grafted onto the capital-subject (and this is also a response to Albritton). Clearly, in Postone’s work, the “capital dialectics” reinterpreted through Marx’s *Grundrisse* is neither a copy, naming, or description of objective reality, nor a mere conceptual movement; as Adorno pointed out, dialectics is neither entirely method nor entirely reality. From Adorno’s perspective, although “capitalist labor” (and the value substance behind it) is a form of social mediation that is itself an “objective contradiction,” it indeed requires the effort of thought (the category of contradiction) to be articulated as a dialectics, thereby forming a compulsion of thought that opposes contradiction within real contradictions and attempts to resolve them. This compulsion forces theorists to construct systems and make rash assertions, and also forces other agents in the real movement to be mobilized by thought, forming a more complex reality of contradictions. This explains why, for Adorno, this “dialectics” situated between subjective method and objective reality still adopts the mode of expression of “subject-object”:

因此，普殊同与阿多诺在观点上，实际只存在表面上的对立。从一个更为宽容的视角看，阿多诺在“辩证法”上的理论突破，虽然承自卢卡奇黑格尔式的马克思主义这一理论传统，但其理论的总体构想，并非就此植根于“具体劳动”衍生出的主—客辩证法（即普殊同诟病的“前资本主义的劳动”形式）。在本文看来，阿多诺不仅可以站在普殊同的视角认同后者就当代资本主义抽象统治在“结构”（或基础）意义上的新贡献，还能提示这一理论在发展过程中的潜在风险。或者说，“否定辩证法”提出的客体优先的“唯物主义目标”，恰恰可以适用于对普殊同嫁接在资本主体上的“资本辩证法”的批判工作（同时这也是对阿尔布瑞顿的回应）。显然，在普殊同那里，经由对马克思《政治经济学批判大纲》重新解读后的“资本辩证法”，并不是对客观现实的摹写、命名与描述，更不是单纯的概念运动；如阿多诺所指出的那样，辩证法既不完全是方法，也并非完全是现实。从阿多诺的视角看，虽然“资本主义劳动”（及其背后的价值实体）是一种社会中介形式，其本身是一种“客观的矛盾”，但的确需经由思想的努力（矛盾的范畴）才能被表述为一种辩证法，继而形成在现实矛盾中反对矛盾，并试图解决矛盾思想的强制力。这种强制力迫使理论家建立体系并妄下断言，也迫使现实运动中的其他能动体被思想调动，形成更为复杂的矛盾的现实。这就解释了为何在阿多诺那里，这种介于主观方法与客观现实之间的“辩证法”，依旧采取了“主—客体”的言说方式：

“In the context where subjectivity cannot evolve on its own, subjectivity changes its nature. Due to this inherent inequality in the concept of mediation, the subject enters the object in a way completely different from how the object enters the subject. Although the object can only be thought through the subject, it always remains something different from the subject; while the subject is by nature initially also an object. Even as an idea, we cannot conceive of a subject that is not an object; but we can conceive of an object that is not a subject. That the subject is also an object is part of the meaning of subjectivity; but that the object becomes a subject is not part of the meaning of objectivity… Acknowledging the priority of the object means drawing a further qualitative distinction from those things that are themselves mediated, an element within dialectics—not transcending dialectics, but expressed within it.” [1]1 Theodor W. Adorno, *Negative Dialectics*, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 183. Translation modified.

在主观性不能靠自己来演进的关联中，主观性改变了自己的性质。由于中介概念内在的这种不平等性，主体以完全不同于客体进入主体的方式进入了客体之中。客体虽然只能靠主体来思考，但仍总是某种不同于主体的东西；而主体在天性上一开始也就是一种客体。即是作为一种观念，我们也不能想象一个不是客体的主体；但我们可以想象一个不是主体的客体。主体也是一种客体，这是主观性的一部分意义；但客体成为主体却不是客观性的一部分意义……承认客体的优势意味着同那些本身是被中介的东西划出进一步的质的区别，意味着辩证法中的一个要素——没有超越辩证法，而是在辩证法中表达出来的。

Similarly, Postone regards capital (albeit on the social level) as a “subject without self-consciousness.” Behind this seemingly “common-sense” expression lies a profundity similar to Adorno’s: capital (i.e., value) operating as a “subject” must still retain a dimension of “socialized object,” and cannot actually be fully grasped by the subjects left in place (whether industrial workers, political parties, or the bourgeoisie). Therefore, the contradiction between value and material wealth in capital (in Postone’s terms) is precisely the mediation that constructs social relations—the value substance and its manifestation of “the priority of the object.” As a theorist, Postone modestly acknowledges that we cannot, like Lukács, predict an “identity,” i.e., that class consciousness would once again encompass the “law of capital” as object (here we set aside for now the fact that Lukács had not yet reached the height of the value form), and integrate the economic dimension of capital with the political dimension of the subject and the party to achieve the creation of history. For this reason, it is precisely Adorno’s “metaphysical” reflection on the problem of identity that provides a more precise explanation for Postone’s paradoxical reading of the “capital-subject.”

同样，普殊同将资本（尽管在社会层面上）视作一种“没有自我意识”的主体，这个看似“常识”性的表述背后，与阿多诺有相似的深刻性：作为“主体”而自我运行的资本（即价值），仍然必须保留一种“社会化的客体”向度，实际无法被留在原地的主体（无论是产业工人、政党或者资产阶级）所彻底把握，因此资本在价值与物质财富上的矛盾（普殊同语），恰恰是构建社会关系的中介——价值实体及其呈现出的“客体优势”。作为理论家的普殊同谦虚地承认，我们无法如同卢卡奇那样预言一种“同一性”，即阶级意识重新涵盖作为客体的“资本规律”（这里我们暂时不论卢卡奇尚且未能达到所谓价值形式的高度），能以主体的、政党的政治维度，整合资本的经济维度，达到对历史的创造。为此，恰恰是阿多诺对同一性问题的“形而上学式”的思考，为普殊同对“资本主体”的悖谬性读解做出了一个更精确的说明。

In this article’s view, the pessimistic orientation of critical theory has not degenerated into a “dirge”; on the contrary, their observation of a stagnant history actually points to the insurmountable major crises within late capitalism—the barbaric state following the crisis of “abstract domination.” This also indicates that Adorno is more inclined to view bourgeois society as a typological stage in the development of human history, and thereby attempts to reveal why the social legacies of the European political revolutions and the Reformation could not be truly realized in the economic, political, and cultural spheres.

在本文看来，批判理论的悲观取向并没有沦为一首“挽歌”，相反他们对停滞历史的观察，实际指出的是晚期资本主义内部不可克服的重大危机——在“抽象统治”危机后的野蛮状态。这也说明，阿多诺更愿意将资产阶级社会看作人类历史发展的一个类型阶段，并由此试图揭示为何欧洲政治革命与宗教改革的社会遗产，无法在经济、政治与文化领域真正落地。

III. Negative Dialectics: Toward an Alliance with the Capital Dialectics

三、否定的辩证法：朝向与资本辩证法的联盟

From Adorno’s perspective, Postone’s formation of an affirmative capital dialectics through the binary contradiction of value form and material wealth easily falls back into the rut of “the compulsion of identity (thinking).” Although Postone constantly emphasizes that capital as “subject” is an “unconscious” “social subject” that towers over social individuals, in Postone’s rather conceptually compulsive narrative, this social subject has already become a “Fichtean” subject, i.e., a transcendent “absolute self” that posits the “non-self.” The “capital-subject,” precisely because it is “non-self-conscious” and necessarily lacks self-reflexivity, can all the better manifest the impulse and desire for “universal domination” as presented in Fichte, forming in the narrative, through the conceptual compulsion of thought, a firm and optimistic narrative inertia. Therefore, from a certain perspective, although the “subject” of the value substance that Postone offers negates the subject of “class consciousness” in Lukács, it still needs to further “negate itself,” developing a negative, truly “object-priority” materialist orientation. As Kong Dechen said: “Postone overemphasizes the modern form of domination of the value form while neglecting the historical analysis of the value form, tailoring social reality with a Hegelian theoretical framework, and failing to delve into the analysis of the internal contradictions of real capitalism.” [2]2 Kong Dechen (孔德臣), a contemporary Chinese scholar of Western Marxism.

从阿多诺的视角看去，普殊同借助价值形式与物质财富二元矛盾形成肯定的资本辩证法，容易重新陷入“同一性（思维）强制”的窠臼之中。虽然普殊同不断强调，作为“主体”的资本，乃是一种“无意识”的，凌驾于社会个体之上的“社会性主体”，但在普殊同颇有概念强制性的叙述中，这一社会性主体已然成为了一种“费希特式”的主体，即一种超然的、设定“非我”的“绝对自我”。“资本—主体”因“非自我意识”必然缺乏自我反思性，恰恰可以更好地成为费希特那里呈现出的“普遍统治”的冲动与渴望，在叙述中借助概念的思维强制率先形成一种牢固的、乐观的叙事惯性。因此，从某种角度看，普殊同给出的价值实体的“主体”虽然否定了卢卡奇那里“阶级意识”的主体，但仍需要进一步“否定自身”，开展出一种否定式的、真正实现“客体优先”的唯物主义定向。如同孔德臣所说的：“普殊同过于强调价值形式的现代统治形式，而忽略了对价值形式的历史性分析，用黑格尔的理论框架裁剪社会现实，未能深入于现实资本主义内在矛盾的分析中。”

From the perspective of negative dialectics, materialism does not merely rest at grasping the real subject, but must redefine the object, or the object that the subject confronts. Adorno formulates his definition of materialism as follows: “It is precisely through the turn to the primacy of the object that dialectics becomes materialist.” [n] Therefore, Adorno’s negative dialectics aims to examine the dialectical method itself, and thereby to find a way for theory to once again distill those things that appear as objective, contingent, and discontinuous—in short, as what is not spirit itself. Unlike Postone’s affirmative, “forward-moving” line (advancing from Lukács’s commodity fetishism to the value form), Adorno reflects from another angle on the idealist error of theory: the need to construct a totalizing system in advance on one side of thought in order to confirm a narrative of emancipation. For the argumentative goal of this article, establishing a materialism of the “primacy of the object” is first of all embodied in a self-awareness of the coercive character of theory-system in thinking:

而从否定辩证法的视角看，唯物主义并非仅仅停留于对实在主体的把握，而是要重新界定客体，或者界定主体所面对的对象。阿多诺如此表述他对唯物主义的界定，即“正是由于转向客体的优先地位，辩证法才变成了唯物主义的”。因此，阿多诺的否定性辩证法，旨在对辩证方法本身进行考察，继而找到理论再度提炼出那些表现为客体的、偶然的，以及非连续性的——总之非精神自身的东西。与普殊同肯定的、“正面推进”的路线不同（从卢卡奇的商品拜物教推进至价值形式），阿多诺则从另一个视角反思理论的唯心主义错误：为了确证一种解放叙事，而不得不在思想的一端先行构建总体性的体系。就本文的论证目标而言，确立“客体优先”的唯物主义，首先体现在对理论—体系在思维强制性上的自我觉察：

The materialist reversal of dialectics most emphatically highlights the discontinuity of that which has not been inspiringly united by spirit and concept … The universality of history, the logic of things congealed in the necessity of the general trend, rests on something contingent, something external to it, namely on what it does not need to become. Not only Hegel, but also Marx and Engels—their idealism is expressed almost solely in their relation to totality—refused to doubt the inevitability of any totality. Anyone who intends to change the world cannot avoid this doubt, but Marx and Engels warded it off as a fatal blow not to their system but to the ruling order.

辩证法上唯物主义的颠倒最突出强调的是，洞察那种未被精神和概念统一而令人鼓舞地结合起来的东西的不连续性……历史的普遍性、在总趋势的必然性中结成的事物的逻辑建立在某种偶然的东西之上，某种外在于它的东西之上，也就是它不需要成为的东西之上。不仅黑格尔，而且还有马克思和恩格斯——他们的唯心主义差不多只是表现在与总体性的关系上——都曾拒绝怀疑一切总体性的不可避免性。任何打算改变世界的人都免不了产生这种怀疑，但马克思和恩格斯挡开了这种对他们的体系而不是对统治制度的致命打击。

We may compare *Negative Dialectics* with Lukács’s 1967 “Preface to the New Edition.” In the passage where Adorno discusses the “concept of spirit,” he follows the same path as Lukács, attempting to restore a “theoretical activity” in which thought changes due to its coercive need, thereby forcing itself to construct a totalizing system in thought. And both men’s target of critique is Hegel, the author of the *Phenomenology of Spirit*. If Lukács, in his “self-criticism,” acknowledged that the coercive demand of thinking forces the proletariat to become the “subject-object identical” of history, then Adorno’s genealogical interpretation of Hegel’s concept of reason attempts to expose why this coerciveness of thinking is inevitable: spirit can blend with “material” and “individual” elements, but at the same time cancels the legitimacy of the latter’s existence. This tendency is buried not only in Hegel’s distinctive concept of labor, but is directly expressed in Hegel’s logic in the definition of being and nothingness. In Lukács, labor points directly to the debate over objectification and alienation. However, Adorno does not dwell on the details of the concept of reification, but points to the broader concept of spirit. And in his view, only by forcing thought to recognize that the concept of spirit is merely an activity can the concept of spirit avoid encroaching on the right of the other to exist and truly move toward the other. On this point, Adorno’s formulation undoubtedly inherits the direction opened up by Lukács’s self-criticism. For this reason, the “materialism” defined by Marx must still return to its anthropological foundation.

我们不妨将《否定的辩证法》与卢卡奇1967年的“新版序言”做一对照。在阿多诺论及“精神的概念”的段落里，他与卢卡奇的路径一样，试图还原一种思想因其强制性需要而产生变化的“理论活动”，继而迫使自身在思想中建构总体性体系。而两人的批判对象都是《精神现象学》的作者黑格尔。如果说，卢卡奇在“自我批评”中承认了思维的强制性要求迫使无产阶级成为了历史的“主—客同一体”，那么阿多诺对黑格尔理性概念的谱系学式阐释，则试图揭露思维强制性为何必定如此：精神能与“物质性”“个别性”要素糅合，但同时取消后者存在的正当性。而这倾向不仅埋藏在黑格尔独特的劳动概念之中，更直接体现在黑格尔逻辑学关于存在与虚无的界定之中。在卢卡奇那里，劳动直接指向了对象化与异化的论争。不过，阿多诺并不纠结于物化概念的细节，而是指向了更为宽泛的精神概念。并且在他的眼中，只有迫使思维承认精神概念不过是一种活动，才能让精神概念不侵吞他者的存在权利，而真正走向他者。在这一点上，阿多诺的表述无疑是继承了卢卡奇自我批评所开出的路向。为此，马克思所界定的“唯物主义”，仍然需要回到它的人类学地基上。

It is worth noting that Adorno’s negative transformation of Hegel’s dialectics does not stop at the dialectics of consciousness in the *Phenomenology of Spirit*. In *Negative Dialectics*, Adorno develops his own formulation of the finitude of the object in response to the starting point of Hegel’s logic—the treatment of the themes of being and nothingness. Here, Adorno acutely points out that Hegel’s purpose in positing the totality of spirit is to allow spirit, in the logical progression, to absorb the elements of the other solely by itself and finally to complete the entire movement of self-return. But this logical formulation is necessarily abstract and empty, separated by a thousand mountains and rivers from concrete life. For this reason, when the process of return cannot be completed solely by conceptual argument (such as the circle of being-nothingness), it must again resort to a more real process—social labor. But in the movement of this labor, spiritual activity on the one hand relies on concrete individuals and the material means they employ, and on the other hand degrades the individuals in the activity, reducing them to a function (just as the “laborer” becomes a form of existence of capital). Thus, individualized labor is beautified into a self-existing law or formula, and the individual disappears. It is not difficult to see that the category of social labor in Adorno’s writing is not, as Postone believes, stuck at a subject-object dialectics at the level of consciousness; on the contrary, Adorno, like Postone, discerns from the historical moment of the present bourgeois society the tendency of the process of social labor to inevitably lead to the movement of a “quasi-independent” substance.

值得注意的是，阿多诺对黑格尔辩证法的否定性改造，并非止步于《精神现象学》中的意识的辩证法。在《否定的辩证法》中，阿多诺针对黑格尔逻辑学的起点——对存在与虚无论题的表述，展开了自己就客体有限性论题的表述。在这里，阿多诺敏锐地指出，黑格尔为精神设定总体性的目的，是为了让精神在逻辑的演进中仅仅凭借自身就可以不断吸收他者的要素，并最终完成整个自我复归的运动。但这种逻辑的表述势必是抽象且空洞的，与具体生活相隔千山万水。为此，当复归的历程无法仅仅依赖于概念的论说（如存在—虚无的圆圈）而完成时，就必须重新求助于一个更加实在的过程——社会劳动。但在这种劳动的运动过程中，精神活动一方面依靠具体的个人及其运用的物质手段，另一方面又要贬低活动中的个人，将其贬低为一种功能。（如同“劳动者”沦为资本的一种存在形式）。于是，个体化的劳动被美化为了一种自在的规律或公式，而个体在此消失了。不难看出，阿多诺笔下的社会劳动范畴，并非普殊同所认为的那样停留在一种意识层次的主—客辩证法；相反，阿多诺与普殊同一样从当下的资产阶级社会这一历史时刻中，洞察了社会劳动过程势必导向“准独立”的实体运动的倾向。

Returning to Adorno’s critique of logic. Adorno attributes Hegel’s demand to reify spirit to a fascination with universality, rather than to an objectifying activity within the philosophy of consciousness; its ultimate goal is to devour the element of individuality, treating the particular individual merely as an instrument for realizing the universal. When Hegel, in the *Phenomenology of Spirit*, takes labor as the model for unfolding the dialectic of the “subject” returning to itself via the “object” toward the subject-object identical, and thereby rising from the particular to the universal, Adorno points out within this the tendency of reason to attempt to make itself independent and to detach itself from existence. On this point, Adorno and Postone have no principled difference.

再回到阿多诺对逻辑学的批判。对于黑格尔将精神实在化的诉求，阿多诺将其归因于一种对普遍性的迷恋，而非意识哲学领域内的对象化活动，其最终目标是吞噬个体性的要素，仅仅将特殊的个体视作实现普遍的工具。当黑格尔在《精神现象学》中以劳动为论述模型展开“主体”，经由“客体”向“主—客”同一体的自我回归，继而从特殊上升到普遍的辩证法时，阿多诺在其中点出了理性试图将自身独立化并脱离存在的目标，这一点阿多诺与普殊同并无原则上的差异。

But Adorno’s opponents are not only the idealist camp, but also the mechanistic, fatalistic materialist dialectics, which attempts to bind Hegel’s logical formulas to the law of commodity value revealed by Marx. Such a materialist dialectics undoubtedly opposes any ideology and vulgar worldview, and to do so it chooses an alliance with science. However, whether or not it can present itself as a science, once it degenerates into a rigid force and decays into a bureaucratic hierarchy, it inevitably becomes a more vulgar worldview. Adorno says of this: this materialism, originating from “being determines consciousness,” after unconsciously spiritualizing the materialist elements and turning them into a pure functionality that transcends all beings, also eliminates the critical character of materialism toward false consciousness and becomes a new ideology.

但阿多诺的对手并不只有唯心主义阵营，也有机械论式、宿命论式的唯物辩证法，后者试图将黑格尔的逻辑公式与马克思揭示的商品价值规律绑定起来。这样一种唯物辩证法无疑反对任何意识形态以及粗俗的世界观，为了做到这一点它选择了与科学进行联盟。然而，无论它是否可以将自己表述为一种科学，一旦它堕落为僵化的强力，衰败为某种官僚主义式的科层制时，势必成为一种更粗俗的世界观。阿多诺为此说到，这种起源于“存在决定意识”的唯物论，在他不知不觉地把唯物主义要素精神化，并使之变成超越一切存在者的纯粹功能性后，他也清除了唯物主义对虚假意识的批判性，并成为一种新的意识形态。

Hence, Adorno, drawing on the formulation of Marx and Engels in *The German Ideology*, points out the awkward situation of the orientation toward the actualization of spirit. “The statement that consciousness depends on being is not an inverted metaphysics; it is directed against the illusion that spirit is in-itself, that spirit dwells beyond the totality of the process in which it finds itself as one element.” For Marx, “consciousness” (another name for spirit) makes its appearance in a mood of annoyance and vexation, under the determination of the four historical specifications; in Adorno’s case, the “vexed spirit” manifests itself in the philosopher more prominently as an emotion of “rage,” like a hungry animal that negates food—it does not permit any other being outside itself. Thus, thought demands self-actualization, and this implies that in the philosopher’s eyes, for spirit (or consciousness) to become actual, although it must resort to the mediation of the object, it is unwilling to acknowledge the object’s status. As Ernst summarizes: “For Adorno, both spirit and the commodity signify an inversion, namely the inversion of the domination of first nature into the domination of second nature; within society, second nature’s domination functions, like spirit, in an incomprehensible and uncontrollable manner.” In this sense, Adorno turns the narrative of “progress” into one of “regression,” and his incisive critique of the coercive, one-sided character of the subject is condensed into a “negative dialectics.” Moreover, Adorno conceives within his negative dialectics a priority and resistance of the object. “For Adorno, the autonomy of the subject depends precisely on the recollection (Eingedenken) of the preponderance (Präponderanz) of the object; this resistance is ‘first of all’ that which, at the material and substantive level, does not serve the priority of the (conceptualized—author’s note) ‘subject,’ that which does not belong to the subject’s means of identification and domination (i.e., concepts and exchange value).”

故此，阿多诺借鉴了马克思和恩格斯在《德意志意识形态》中的表述，指出了精神实在化取向的尴尬的处境。“意识依赖于存在，这一说法不是颠倒过来的形而上学，它针对的是一种幻想——精神是自在的，精神居于它发现自身是其中一个要素的总体过程的彼岸。”对马克思来说，“意识”（精神的别称）是在历史的四种规定性的设定下，以一种懊恼烦闷的姿态出场的；在阿多诺这里，“懊恼的精神”在哲学家那里更凸显出一种“狂怒”的情绪，好比是一个否定食物的饥饿动物——不允许他们之外还有其他存在者。于是，思维要求自我实现，而这预示着在哲学家眼中，精神（或者意识）要变得实在，这虽然要求助于客体的中介，却不愿意承认客体的地位。如同恩斯特所概述的：“精神和商品对于阿多诺来说都意味着一种颠倒，即第一自然的统治颠倒为第二自然的统治，在社会内部第二自然的统治就像精神一样以一种不可理喻的、不可支配的方式发挥作用。”在这个意义上，阿多诺将“进步”翻转为“退步”的叙事手法，以及对主体之强制性、单向性所做的深入批判，凝练为了一种“否定的辩证法”。不仅如此，阿多诺还在他的否定辩证法中构想了一种客体的优先性和反抗性。“在阿多诺那里，主体的自治恰恰依赖于对客体支配性优势（Präponderanz）的追溯（Eingedenken，或译成‘回忆’ ——笔者注），这种反抗‘首先’是那些在物质和实质层面不为（概念化的——笔者注）‘主体’的优先性服务、不属于主体的同一化和统治手段（即概念和交换价值）的东西。”

It can be acknowledged that although Postone accurately grasps the vacuity in Adorno’s thought arising from its lack of the value-form thesis (i.e., the lack of a dimension of critique of political economy), he mistakenly portrays it as a narrow and cramped theoretical image (aesthetic pessimism). This leads the first generation of critical theory, which sought to continue the Marx–Lukács theoretical tradition, to become a Heideggerian nostalgia, a so-called pessimistic discourse. In fact, when Adorno emphasizes the dialectics of social labor and its non-identity, he is not merely discussing the history of human civilization; rather, following Lukács’s line of abstract domination, he further elaborates how abstract domination can persist in the social structure of late capitalism in an even more violent form. Moreover, the commodity category and its duality do not disappear in critical theory (especially in Adorno); on the contrary, its principle of equivalent exchange is interpreted in a historical, generative manner. Therefore, Adorno never regards his rational critique of human history as supra-historical; rather, Adorno always stands on the ground of historicism. Whether in *Dialectic of Enlightenment* or in *Negative Dialectics*, we can see him fundamentally defining contemporary forms through the power formations of different historical stages and through a genealogical investigation of the principle of equal exchange in the present era. It can be said that Adorno always reinterprets the material content concealed by the rhetoric of civilization in early myths and epics from the perspective of contemporary capitalism. Thus, Adorno’s negative dialectics well explains why the old mythical age and its theoretical forms inevitably collapse. In contrast, *Dialectic of Enlightenment* (especially the appendix on Odysseus) better embodies Marx’s method of historical analysis (in Gramsci’s words), which, holding the key of “human anatomy” (the power form and social construction core of late capitalism), opens the “monkey body” (pre-capitalist social formations). For this reason, the “materialism” defined by Marx must still return to its anthropological foundation, to the various continuing “antagonisms” within a rational natural history.

可以承认的是，普殊同虽然准确地抓住了阿多诺思想中因其缺乏价值形式论题（也即缺乏政治经济学批判维度）而存在的空泛性，但却错误地将其塑造为一个逼仄狭隘的理论形象（审美的悲观主义）。这使得试图延续马克思—卢卡奇理论传统的第一代批判理论，成为了一种海德格尔式的乡愁，即一种所谓的悲观主义论调。事实上，阿多诺强调社会劳动及其非同一性的辩证法，谈论的并不仅仅是人类文明史，而是沿着卢卡奇抽象统治的路线，进一步论述抽象统治何以可能以更加暴力的形式留存于晚期资本主义的社会结构中。此外，商品范畴及其二重性，并非在批判理论（尤其是阿多诺）那里消失了，相反它的等价交换原则，被以一种历史性的、创生性的方式解读。因此，阿多诺从未认为自己对人类史的理性批判是超历史主义的，毋宁说，阿多诺始终站在历史主义的地基之上。无论是在《启蒙辩证法》中，还是在《否定的辩证法》中，我们都能看到他依托不同历史阶段的权力形态，以及依托现时代平等交换原则的谱系学考察对当代形式进行了根本性的界定。可以说，阿多诺一直站在当代资本主义的视角重新阐发早期神话和史诗中被文明的修辞所掩盖的物质性内容。因此，阿多诺的否定的辩证法，很好地阐释了旧有的神话时代及其理论形态为何必然走向土崩瓦解。与之相对，《启蒙辩证法》（尤其是《奥德修斯》的附录），则更好地体现了马克思的历史分析方法（葛兰西语），后者手持“人体解剖”的钥匙（晚期资本主义的权力形态与社会建构内核），打开“猴体”（前资本主义的社会形态）。为此马克思所界定的“唯物主义”，仍然需要回到它的人类学地基上，回到一种理性的自然史上种种继续存在着的“对抗性”。

Conclusion

结 语

In terms of content, if Postone’s value-form dialectics is to turn toward genuine historical materialism and thereby answer the demand of how capital as value-substance constructs social content, the key lies not only in obtaining “material” content but also in overcoming the tendency toward re-idealization after capturing material content. On the one hand, Postone and the entire value-form theory provide contemporary critical theory with an effective theoretical resource, namely a capital dialectics (but only an “ideal type” of the movement of modern capitalist society), which can help us understand the internal contradictions and developmental tendencies of present-day life at the “structural” level, thereby dissipating a certain pessimistic mood actually existing in theoretical circles (this is related to Adorno’s mode of expression, but has little to do with his theoretical content). On the other hand, Adorno’s “negative dialectics,” at a higher reflective level, analyzes the internal tension of Lukács’s totality dialectics (the “coerciveness of dialectical reason” and its internal “closure”), and also issues a warning about the idealist risk latent in Postone’s value-form dialectics (capital dialectics), which continues Lukács’s “abstract labor.” For this reason, a “thought alliance” between Postone and Adorno is not an unworthy theoretical conception. To borrow Kant’s formulation: without a positive dialectics, negative dialectics would fall into emptiness; without a negative element, positive dialectics would inevitably fall into blindness.

从内容上看，普殊同的价值形式辩证法要转向真正的历史唯物主义，从而解答价值实体的资本何以建构社会内容的要求，其关键不仅在于获得“物质性”的内容，而且必须克服捕获物质内容后的再度唯心化趋势。一方面，普殊同以及整个价值形式理论为当代批判理论提供了一种有效的理论资源，即一种资本辩证法（但仅仅是现代资本主义社会运动的“理想型”），它能够帮助我们理解当下生活能够帮助我们理解当下生活在“结构”层次上的内在矛盾与发展趋向，以便消解某种实际存在于理论界的悲观情绪（这一点与阿多诺的理论的言说方式有关，但与其理论内涵无甚关系）。另一方面，阿多诺的“否定的辩证法”却在一个更高的反思维度上，解析了卢卡奇总体性辩证法的内在张力（“辩证理性的强制性”及其内部的“封闭性”），也对普殊同延续卢卡奇“抽象劳动”开展的价值形式辩证法（资本辩证法）潜藏的唯心主义风险做出了提示。为此，普殊同与阿多诺的“思想联盟”未尝不是一种可取的理论构想。套用康德的说法：若无肯定的辩证法，否定辩证法则会陷入空洞；若无否定性要素，肯定的辩证法必将陷入盲目。

Online editor: Paul

网络编辑：保罗