Adorno and Marx: Negative Dialectics and the Critique of Political Economy

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While Adorno has tended to be read as a critic of the administered world and the consumer industry rather than a Marxist, Adorno and Marx establishes Adornos negative dialectics as fundamental for understanding Marxs critique of political economy. This conception of the critique of political economy as a critical theory marks both a radical departure from traditional Marxist scholarship and from traditional readings of Adornos work and warns against identifying Adorno with Marx or Marx with Adorno. Rather, it highlights the intersection between Adornos critical theory and Marxs critique of political economy that produces a critical theory of economic objectivity that moves beyond Marxian economics and Adornonian social theory. Adorno and Marx offers an ingenious account of critical social theory. Its subversion of the economic categories of political economy contributes to the cutting-edge of contemporary social theory and its critique of social practice.

Reviews

The illuminating studies gathered in this collection bring to the surface, for thought and discussion, capitals submerged social contentconcealed, as it must be, in the objective illusion of the economy. One of capitals deadly abstractions, the economy is neither the base of capitalist society, nor the source of its movement; it is, rather, the constellation of inverted appearances assumed by the capital-labour relation itself. Read this book because thinking Adorno and Marx together shows us how capital continues by moving on in the guise of something newit always was the something worse yet to come. * Beverley Best, Associate Professor, Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University, Canada *
In this acute and unapologetically politicized volume, OKane and Bonefeld ask us to adjust our view of Adorno as a cultural critic of the administered world and instead to recognise his role as a Marxist critic of society: one who understood capitalism as a negative totality of inverted sociability, a topsy-turvy world in which capitalist categories depend on the vanished premise of real human suffering. These varied and lively essays point to the devastating compromises of a labour-centric politics of state socialism. They reject moral commitments to liberal categories of civic equality, justice, freedom, and reason. But they also pose, against simplistic notions of the structural, a concept of social form that can help us to understand how economic abstractions work on, through, and by the hand of wounded subjects * Amy De'Ath, Lecturer in Contemporary Literature, King's College London, UK *
Adorno and Marx: Negative Dialectics and the Critique of Political Economy is an insightful collection of essays that adds to a growing body of Marxist scholarship correcting widespread misconceptions about both Marxs critique of political economy and the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory. * Marx and Philosophy Review of Books *

Author Bio

Werner Bonefeld is Professor of Politics at the University of York, UK. He is the author of The Strong State and PoliticalEconomy (2017), Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy (Bloomsbury, 2014) and is co-editor of The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory (with Beverly Best and Chris O'Kane, 2018). He is also co-editor the Bloomsbury series Critical Theory and the Critique of Society (with Chris O'Kane) Chris OKane is Assistant Professor of Political Science at University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, USA.