Werner Bonefeld - Adorno and Marx: Negative Dialectics and the Critique of Political Economy

Adorno and Marx

In a time marked by crises and the rise of right-wing authoritarian populism, Critical Theory and the Critique of Society intends to renew the critical theory of capitalist society exemplified by the Frankfurt School and critical Marxisms critiques of social domination, authoritarianism, and social regression by expounding the development of such a notion of critical theory, from its founding thinkers, through its subterranean and parallel strands of development, to its contemporary formulations.

Series editors: Werner Bonefeld, University of York, UK and Chris OKane, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, USA

Editorial Board:

John Abromeit, History, SUNY, Buffalo State, USA

Charlotte Baumann, Philosophy, Sussex/TU Berlin

Bev Best, Sociology, Concordia University

Dirk Braunstein, Institute of Social Research, Frankfurt

Amy Death, Contemporary Literature and Culture, Kings College London

Rochelle Duford, Philosophy, University of Hartford

Verena Erlenbusch, Philosophy, University of Memphis

Samir Gandesha, Humanities, Simon Fraser University

Edith Gonzalez, Humanities, Universidad Intercultural del Estado de Puebla, Mxico

Sami Khatib, Art, Leuphana University

Dimitra Kotouza, Education, University of Lincoln

Elena Louisa Lange, Japanese Studies/Philology and Philosophy, University of Zurich

Claudia Leeb, Political Science, Washington State University

Christian Lotz, Philosophy, Michigan State University

Jordi Maiso, Philosophy, Complutense University of Madrid

Cat Moir, Germanic Studies, University of Sydney

Kirstin Munro, Political Science, University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley

Patrick Murray, Philosophy, Creighton University

Duy Lap Nguyen, Modern and Classical Languages, University of Houston

Mathias Nilges, Literature, St Xavier University

Moishe Postone, History, University of Chicago

Matthias Rothe, German, University of Minnesota

Marcel Stoetzler, Sociology, University of Bangor

Marina Vishmidt, Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths University

Jos Antonio Zamora Zaragoza, Philosophy, the Institute of Philosophy of the CCHS/CSIC

Available titles:

Right-wing Culture in Contemporary Capitalism, Mathias Nilges

Adorno and Neoliberalism, Charles Andrew Prusik

Toward a Critical Theory of Nature, Carl Cassegrd

Spectacular Logic in Hegel and Debord, Eric-John Russell

Adorno and Marx

Negative Dialectics and the Critique of Political Economy

Edited by

Werner Bonefeld and Chris OKane

Contents

Fabian Arzuaga currently teaches for the Critical Writing Studies program at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. His work has appeared in Foundations and Philosophy & Social Criticism. His book Marx, Adorno and the Critique of Labor: Individuality in the Age of Surplus Populations will be published by Bloomsbury.

Charlotte Baumann is Fjodor Lynen-Fellow at the University of Sussex, with an experienced researcher grant from the Humboldt foundation. She has published in the European Journal of Philosophy, the Journal of the History of Philosophy and the British Journal of the History of Philosophy and contributed to the Oxford Handbook on Adorno.

Nico Bobka is Lecturer at Frankfurt and Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences. He is currently pursuing a project on Theodor W. Adornos dialectical critique of ontology and the so-called ontological need at the Free University of Berlin.

Werner Bonefeld is Professor of Politics at the University of York, UK. With Beverley Best and Chris OKane he co-edited the Sage Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory (Sage, 2018). Recent book publications include Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy (Bloomsbury 2014) and The Strong State and the Free Economy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017).

Dirk Braunstein is Research Assistant at the Institute for Social Research, University of Frankfurt. He is the author of Adornos Kritik der politischen konomie (Transcipt, 2011) and the editor of Die Frankfurter Seminare Theodor W. Adornos. Gesammelte Sitzungsprotokolle 1949-1969, four volumes (de Gruyter, 2021).

Kirstin Munro is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Her recent publications include articles in Capital & Class, Critical Sociology (with Chris OKane), Environment and Planning: E and Science & Society. Her book Eco-Conscious Households and Sustainability: Compromise, Conflict and Complicity will be published by the University of Bristol Press.

Chris OKane is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. His work has recently appeared in Critical Historical Studies, (with Kirstin Munro) Critical Sociology, Science & Society and Review of Radical Political Economics. With Beverley Best and Werner Bonefeld he co-edited the Sage Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory (Sage, 2018).

Charles Prusik is an instructor of philosophy and ethics at Villanova University. He received his PhD in philosophy in 2017. His research specializes in critical theory and political economy, and he is the author of Adorno and Neoliberalism: The Critique of Exchange Society (Bloomsbury, 2020).

Marcel Stoetzler is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Bangor University, UK. He has published on (Frankfurt School) Critical Theory, feminist theory, and the theory and history of antisemitism. His publications include the edited volume Antisemitism and the Constitution of Sociology (University of Nebraska Press, 2014) and The State, the Nation and the Jews. Liberalism and the Antisemitism Dispute in Bismarcks Germany (University of Nebraska Press, 2008).

Werner Bonefeld and Chris OKane

The title of the book summarizes a recent intellectual history of the development of the critique of political economy as a critical social theory which emerged in the context of the new left of the late 1960s and has been elaborated by successive generations of critical scholars in different institutional settings ever since. The influence of the Frankfurt School is of particular importance for its development. It is connected with the Adorno-inspired New Reading of Marx in the then West Germany.

The conception of the critique of political economy as a critical social theory is founded, first and foremost, on the rejection of the traditional Marxist notion of the economic forces as primary and its conception of class struggle as the motor of historical progress. Instead, these new readings conceived of the economy as an inverted form of the capitalistically organized social relations, and of the economic categories as perverted social categories. The economic

Marx argues further that the fetishism of commodities emerges from the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them.of the Gotha Programme to the socialists of his time similarly rejects their endorsement of labour as the category of social wealth as an ill-founded idea that takes the social character of capitalist labour as the ontological foundation of wealth in every society.

The new readings of the critique of political economy as a critical social theory rejected traditional versions of historical materialism as legitimating the then state socialist regimes and the organizational form of the Party as the vehicle of socialist transformation. Critically understood, Marxs point about the peculiar social character of labour as the foundation of the fetishism of commodities demystifies the centrality of labour as the negative ontology of the capitalist social relations. Moishe Postones understanding of the critique of political economy as a critique of labour economy derives from this insight. The practical consequences of this shift from a political economy of labour organization to a critique of political economy are formidable. It cuts from underfoot the idea of state-socialism as an alternative to the capitalist labour economy.