sectors of industry – steel, petroleum, electricity, and chemicals. Culture
monopolies are weak and dependent in comparison. They cannot afford to neglect
their appeasement of the real holders of power if their sphere of activity in mass
society (a sphere producing a specific type of commodity which anyhow is still too
closely bound up with easygoing liberalism and Jewish intellectuals) is not to
undergo a series of purges. The dependence of the most powerful broadcasting
company on the electrical industry, or of the motion picture industry on the banks,
is characteristic of the whole sphere, whose individual branches are themselves
economically interwoven. All are in such close contact that the extreme
concentration of mental forces allows demarcation lines between different firms
and technical branches to be ignored. The ruthless unity in the culture industry is
evidence of what will happen in politics. Market differentiations such as those of A
and B films, or of stories in magazines in different price ranges, depend not so much
on subject matter as on classifying, organizing, and labelling consumers.
Something is provided for all so that none may escape; the distinctions are
emphasized and extended. The public is catered for with a hierarchical range of
mass-produced products of varying quality, thus advancing the rule of complete
quantification. Everybody must behave (as if spontaneously) in accordance with his
previous determined and indexed level, and choose the category of mass product
turned out for his type. Consumers appear as statistics on research organization
charts, and are divided by income groups into red, green, and blue areas; the
technique is that used for any type of propaganda. 
How formalized the procedure is can be seen when the mechanically
differentiated products prove to be all alike in the end. That the difference between
the Chrysler range and General Motors products is basically illusory strikes every
child with a keen interest in varieties. What connoisseurs discuss as good or bad
points serve only to perpetuate the semblance of competition and range of choice.
The same applies to the Warner Brothers and Metro Goldwyn Mayer productions.
But even the differences between the more expensive and cheaper models put out
by the same firm steadily diminish: for automobiles, there are such differences as
the number of cylinders, cubic capacity, details of patented gadgets; and for films
there are the number of stars, the extravagant use of technology, labour, and
equipment, and the introduction of the latest psychological formulas. The universal
criterion of merit is the amount of ‘conspicuous production’ of blatant cash
investment. The varying budgets in the culture industry do not bear the slightest
relation to factual values, to the meaning of the products themselves. Even the
technical media are relentlessly forced into uniformity. Television aims at a
synthesis of radio and film, and is held up only because the interested parties have
not yet reached agreement, but its consequences will be quite enormous and promise
to intensify the impoverishment of aesthetic matter so drastically, that by tomorrow
the thinly veiled identity of all industrial culture products can come triumphantly
out into the open, derisively fulfilling the Wagnerian dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk
– the fusion of all the arts in one work. The alliance of word, image, and music is all
the more perfect than in Tristan because the sensuous elements which all
approvingly reflect the surface of social reality are in principle embodied in the
same technical process, the unity of which becomes its distinctive content. This
process integrates all the elements of the production, from the novel (shaped with