The Adventures of the Commodity: For a Critique of Value

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The Adventures of the Commodity explores conceptions of a capitalist society that is ordered entirely around the exigencies of the commodity, money and labour. A distinctive introduction to critiques of capitalism and commodity society, this book illuminates the difficult concept of 'abstract' labour. Merging this with the social critique known as the critique of value, first developed by Robert Kurz and the German journal, Krisis, in the 1990s, Anselm Jappe highlights in particular a central, and often contested, aspect of this critique: the claim that, for several decades now, capitalism has entered into a crisis that is not cyclical, but terminal. If a society that is founded upon the fetishism of the commodity, on the value created by the abstract side of labour and represented in money, this is the result of the fact that its primary internal contradiction has reached a point of no return: the replacement of living labour, the only source of value, by ever-more sophisticated technologies.

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Anselm Jappe is one of the most gifted thinkers of the value theory current, which wants to understand the capitalist system, based on abstract labor and money, a blind and impersonal system that reduces everything to a commodity. This essay is more than ever relevant today, when the logic of infinite value accumulation is leading to an ecological catastrophe. * Michael Lwy, Emeritus Research Director, French National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS), France *
The Adventures of the Commodity provides a necessary introduction to the critique of value for the anglophone world, a correct assessment of the complex dynamics of capitalist society at its most fundamental level. The logical approach offers a reliable means of diagnosing current tendencies in a society constrained by certain logical perimeters imposed by the capitalist mode of production. * Marx & Philosophy Review of Books *

Author Bio

Anselm Jappe is Professor of Philosophy and teacher of aesthetics at the Fine Arts Academy, Italy. He is a key theorist of the critique of value-dissociation and also a leading researcher on the Situationist International. He is the author of numerous works of anti-capitalist critical theory such as Guy Debord (1993), Lavant-garde inacceptable (2005) and The Writing on the Wall: On The Decomposition of Capitalism and its Critics (2017).