civil values. It is also worth emphasizing that when this essay was written the
cultural industry was less variegated than it was to become, during the 1960s in
particular. Hollywood, for instance, was still “vertically integrated” so that the five
major studios owned the production, distribution, and exhibition arms of the film
business between them; television was still in its infancy; the LP and the single
were unknown; the cultural market had not been broken into various demographic
sectors – of which, in the 1950s, the youth segment was to become the most
energetic. This helps to explain how Adorno and Horkheimer neglect what was to
become central to cultural studies: the ways in which the cultural industry, while in
the service of organized capital, also provides the opportunities for all kinds of
individual and collective creativity and decoding. 
Further reading: Adorno 1991; Berman 1989; Connerton 1980; Jameson 1990;
Jay 1984a; Kracauer 1995; Pensky 1997. 
The sociological theory that the loss of the support of objectively established
religion, the dissolution of the last remnants of precapitalism, together with
technological and social differentiation or specialization, have led to cultural chaos
is disproved every day; for culture now impresses the same stamp on everything.
Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in
every part. Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their
enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system. The decorative industrial
management buildings and exhibition centres in authoritarian countries are much
the same as anywhere else. The huge gleaming towers that shoot up everywhere are
outward signs of the ingenious planning of international concerns, towards which
the unleashed entrepreneurial system (whose monuments are a mass of gloomy
houses and business premises in grimy, spiritless cities) was already hastening.
Even now the older houses just outside the concrete city centres look like slums, and
the new bungalows on the outskirts are at one with the flimsy structures of world
fairs in their praise of technical progress and their built-in demand to be discarded
after a short while like empty food cans. Yet the city housing projects designed to
perpetuate the individual as a supposedly independent unit in a small hygienic
dwelling make him all the more subservient to his adversary – the absolute power
of capitalism. Because the inhabitants, as producers and as consumers, are drawn
into the centre in search of work and pleasure, all the living units crystallize into
well-organized complexes. The striking unity of microcosm and macrocosm
presents men with a model of their culture: the false identity of the general and the
particular. Under monopoly all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial
framework begin to show through. The people at the top are no longer so interested
in concealing monopoly: as its violence becomes more open, so its power grows.
Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just
business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately
produce. They call themselves industries; and when their directors’ incomes are
published, any doubt about the social utility of the finished products is removed.