Marx famously asserted that life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life (Marx & Engels 1970: 47). On the orthodox interpretation of this assertion, Marx meant that socioeconomic conditions causally determine what Georg Lukács later called forms of objectivity or thought. Objecting to this interpretation, which implies that all consciousness is false – or ideologically distorted – consciousness, Adorno argues that “the definition of consciousness in terms of being has become a means of dispensing with all consciousness which does not conform to existence” (1967c: 29). When interpreted in a strictly deterministic fashion, Marx's distinction between base and superstructure was used repressively (in the former Soviet Union, for example) to undermine criticism by suggesting that it is impossible to think beyond the given. Against orthodox Marxism, Adorno wants to rescue the “baby” of criticism from the “bathwater” of false consciousness. To denounce all culture as false consciousness would wrongly extirpate “with the false, all that was true also, all that, however impotently, strives to escape the confines of universal practice, every chimerical anticipation of a nobler condition”, thereby bringing about “directly the barbarism that culture is reproached with furthering indirectly” (MM 44).

In Negative Dialectics, however, Adorno gives Marx's claim about the priority of the material life process over consciousness a more positive reading. This claim should not be read as “metaphysics in reverse”, that is, as though it authorized the reduction of consciousness to being, because Marx was primarily criticizing the “delusion that mind … lies beyond the total process in which it finds itself as a moment” (ND 200).