Notes on Wealth as a Real Abstraction and the Critique of Suffering
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.45.1.01Keywords:
critical theory, real abstraction, critique, suffering, wealth, economic compulsionAbstract
The object of a critical theory of society is Man [Menschen] in her historically specific forms of life. The article argues against ontological conceptions of social labour and of economy. Instead it insists that historical materialism far from being a materialism of nature and history, is fundamentally a critique of the objectivity of the capitalist economic categories. For a critical theory of society, the economic concept, capital as a process of the valorisation of value, is not a natural thing but a social relationship between persons that is mediated through things. The fetishism of commodities is real. In the mediated world the social individuals appear as personifications of the economic object; and yet there would be nothing without their social practices—of self-preservation. Human suffering is objectively mediated. The article concludes that suffering is the non-conceptual content of the concept of society as a process of valorisation. The sheer unrest of life is the social constituent of the economic object.
Downloads
References
Adorno, Theodor W. Against Epistemology: A Metacritique. Translated by Willis Domingo. Cambridge: Polity, 2013.
Adorno, Theodor W. Gesellschaftstheorie und Kulturkritik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975.
Adorno, Theodor W. History and Freedom: Lectures 1964–1965. Edited by Rolf Tiedermann. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: Polity, 2006.
Adorno, Theodor W. Introduction to Sociology. Edited by Christoph Gödde. Translated by Edmund F. N. Jephcott. Cambridge: Polity, 2002.
Adorno, Theodor W. Minima Moralia. Translated by Edmund F. N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 2005.
Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. New York: Continuum, 1973.
Adorno, Theodor W. Prisms. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Samuel Weber. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983.
Adorno, Theodor W. “Society.” Translated by F. R. Jameson. In Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, edited by Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner, 267–75. London: Routledge, 1989.
Agnoli, Johannes. “Destruction as the Determination of the Scholar in Miserable Times.” In Revolutionary Writing: Common Sense Essays in Post-Political Politics, edited by Werner Bonefeld, 25–37. New York: Autonomedia, 2003.
Arthur, Chris. “The Inner Totality of Capitalism.” Historical Materialism 14, no. 3 (January 2006): 85–111. https://doi.org/10.1163/156920606778531752.
Arthur, Chris. The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital. Leiden: Brill, 2004.
Arthur, Chris. The Spectre of Capital: Idea and Reality. Leiden: Brill, 2022.
Backhaus, Hans-Georg. Dialektik der Wertform: Untersuchungen zur marxschen Ökonomiekritik. Freiburg: Ça Ira, 1997.
Baumann, Charlotte. “Adorno, the New Reading of Marx, and Methodologies of Critique.” In Adorno and Marx: Negative Dialectics and the Critique of Political Economy, edited by Werner Bonefeld and Chris O’Kane, 55–76. London: Bloomsbury, 2022.
Benjamin, Walter. “Critique of Violence.” In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, translated by Edmund F. N. Jephcott, edited by Peter Demetz, 277–300. New York: Schocken, 1986.
Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations, translated by Harry Zorn, edited by Hannah Arendt, 253–64. London: Pimlico, 1999.
Benzer, Matthias. “Social Critique in the Totally Socialized Society.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 37, no. 5 (June 2011): 575–603. https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453710393317.
Bloch, Ernst. Das Prinzip Hoffnung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973.
Bloch, Ernst. Grundfragen der Philosophie: Ausgewählte Schriften, Band I. Edited by Johann Kreuzer. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1965.
Chattopadhyay, Paresh. “The Economic Content of Socialism: Marx vs. Lenin.” Review of Radical Political Economics 24, no. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 1992): 90–110. https://doi.org/10.1177/048661349202400306.
Clarke, Simon. “Class Struggle and the Working Class: The Problem of Commodity Fetishism.” In The Labour Debate: An Investigation into the Theory and Reality of Capitalist Work, edited by Ana C. Dinerstein and Michael Neary, 50–69. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002.
Clarke, Simon. Keynesianism, Monetarism and the Crisis of the State. Aldershot: Edward and Elgar, 1988.
Clarke, Simon. Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology: From Adam Smith to Max Weber. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992.
Eagleton, Terry. Why Marx Was Right. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.
Financial Times. “Cost of Living Crisis.” Last modified June 19, 2024. https://www.ft.com/cost-of-living-crisis.
Horkheimer, Max. “Traditional and Critical Theory.” In Critical Theory: Selected Essays, translated by Matthew J. O’Connell, 188–243. London: Continuum, 2002.
Kant, Immanuel. The Conflict of the Faculties. Translated by Mary J. Gregor. New York: Abaris, 1979.
Kant, Immanuel. “Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse.” In vol. 8 of Immanuel Kant’s sämmtliche Werke, edited by G. Hartenstein, 607–46. Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1868.
Kicillof, Alex, and Guido Starosta. “On Materiality and Social Form: A Political Critique of Rubin’s Value-Form Theory.” Historical Materialism 15, no. 3 (2007): 9–43. https://doi.org/10.1163/156920607X225852.
Lange, Elena Louisa. Value without Fetish: Uno Kōzō’s Theory of “Pure Capitalism” in Light of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy. Leiden: Brill, 2021.
Lukács, Georg. Soul and Form. Translated by Anna Bostock. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973.
Marcuse, Herbert. Negations. Translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro. London: Free Association Press, 1988.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One. Translated by Ben Fowkes. Hamondsworth: Penguin, 1976.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume Two. Translated by David Fernbach. London: Penguin, 1978.
Marx, Karl. “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction.” Translated by Martin Milligan and Barbara Ruhemann. In Karl Marx, March 1843–August 1844, edited by James S. Allen et al., 175–87. Vol. 3 of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Collected Works. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975.
Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin, 1973.
Marx, Karl. Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, June 27, 1870. In Marx and Engels, 1868–1870, translated by John Peet, Michael Slattery, and Sergei Syrovatkin, edited by Eric Hobsbawm et al., 527. Vol. 43 of Karl Marx, Fredrich Engels: Collected Works. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988.
Moir, Cat. “Ernst Bloch: The Principle of Hope.” In The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, edited by Beverley Best, Werner Bonefeld, and Chris O’Kane, 199–215. London: Sage, 2018.
Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017.
Postone, Moishe. “The Subject and Social Theory: Marx and Lukács on Hegel.” In History and Heteronomy: Critical Essays, edited by Koichi Maeda, 63–84. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy, 2009.
Postone, Moishe. Time, Labour and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Reichelt, Helmut. Neue Marx-Lektüre: Zur Kritik sozialwissenschaftlicher Logik. Freiburg: Ça Ira, 2013.
Reichelt, Helmut. “Social Reality as Appearance: Some Notes on Marx’s Conception of Reality.” Translated by Werner Bonefeld. In Human Dignity: Social Autonomy and the Critique of Capitalism, edited by Werner Bonefeld and Kosmas Psychopedis, 31–68. London: Routledge, 2017.
Reichelt, Helmut. Zur logischen Struktur des Kapitalbegriffs bei Karl Marx. Freiburg: Ça Ira, 2001.
Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Edited by Edwin Cannan. 2 vols. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981.
Starosta, Guido. “The Commodity-Form and the Dialectical Method: On the Structure of Marx’s Exposition in Chapter 1 of Capital.” Science and Society 72, no. 3 (July 2008): 295–318. https://doi.org/10.1521/siso.2008.72.3.295.
Streeck, Wolfgang. How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System. London: Verso, 2016.
Swiffen, Amy. “Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Law.” In The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, edited by Beverley Best, Werner Bonefeld, and Chris O’Kane, 870–85. London: Sage, 2018.
Žižek, Slavoj. “Should the Left’s Answer to Rightist Populism Really Be a ‘Me Too’? Part I.” The Philosophical Salon, October 15, 2018. http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/should-the-lefts-answer-to-rightist-populism-really-be-a-me-too-part-i/#_edn1.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Authors
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Authors guarantee that the work is their own original creation and does not infringe any statutory or common-law copyright or any proprietary right of any third party. In case of claims by third parties, authors commit their self to defend the interests of the publisher, and shall cover any potential costs.
More in: Submission chapter
