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This totalization of domination, the totalization of a system of signs in which human language disappears, no longer manifests itself as a sphere of quasi-naturalness that denies its own historicity. Rather, the very contrast between culture and nature, between second nature and first nature, begins to disappear. 62 The totalization of domination means the increasing manipulation of nature itself. The antagonism between nature and culture now turns into the revenge of nature upon culture. Whereas Marx had demystified the naturalization of the historical, critical theorists seek to demystify the historicization of the natural. It is the revolt of suppressed nature against the totality of domination which Fascism manipulates, and it is the revolt of suppressed nature which mass industry recirculates in images of sex, pleasure, and false happiness. The repression of internal and external nature has grown to such an unprecedented proportion that the rebellion against this repression itself becomes the object of new exploitation and manipulation. Under these conditions, the 'fetishism' of commodities does not distort history into nature, but utilizes the revolt of suppressed nature to mystify the social exploitation of the nature within and without us. In Adorno's language, exchange value no longer conceals the production of use values; quite to the contrary, commodities now compete with each other to present themselves in the immediacy of use values and to fulfil the nostalgia for the work of one's hands, for virgin nature, simplicity, and non-artificiality. Whereas in liberal capitalism, use value was a carrier of exchange value, under organized capitalism, exchange value is marketable in so far as it can present itself as the carrier of an unmediated use value, into the enjoyment of whose 'spontaneous' qualities the advertising industry seduces us. The brutalization of nature under Fascism, the seductive exploitation of nature by the mass media and culture industry, and the nostalgia for the natural and the organic, expressed by conservative culture criticism, have this in common: they manipulate the revolt of repressed nature into submission, oblivion, and pseudo-happiness. 63
Crisis Diagnosis as Retrospective Philosophy of History with Utopian Intent
If organized capitalism has eliminated the autonomous market, if the irrationality of competing individual capitals has been replaced by a system of monopolistic state controls, what then becomes of economic crisis tendencies and potentials in such societies? In his 1941 article, Pollock had already claimed that the capacities of the system to manage and to control crises were unpredictably large. 64 In the postwar period, critical theorists emphasize that organized capitalism has eliminated
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