Adorno and Marx

The illuminating studies gathered in this collection bring to the surface, for thought and discussion, capital’s submerged social content—concealed, as it must be, in the ‘objective illusion’ of the economy. One of capital’s 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 new—it 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, O’Kane 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 Marx’s critique of political economy and the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory. * Marx and Philosophy Review of Books *