Social Constitution and Fetishistic Social Domination in Marx, Lukács, Adorno, and Lefebvre

Chris O'Kane is a critical theorist who lives in Central Queens NY. Chris has taught in London, Humboldt, Portland, Texas, and New York City. He has published widely on Marx, The Frankfurt School, and Marxian Critical Theory. Chris is corresponding editor of the Historical Materialism journal. Along with Werner Bonefeld he edits the Critical Theory and Critique of Society book series.

“Chris O’Kane’s book – embodying a confrontation with such diverse authors as Lukács and Rubin, Adorno and Schmidt, Postone and Heinrich, Lefebvre and Bonefeld – is an indispensable reference for understanding the key distinction between fetish character and fetishism. It goes well beyond the traditional interpretations in terms of alienation, reification, and false consciousness, while providing a most clever backward reading of Marx that allows us to integrate the early Marx into the mature Marx. ‘Things’ are truly endowed with social power under capital, but their autonomous properties are not natural. The book shows that, to uproot the mystification of capitalism as an enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world, one must go back to the human source of abstract wealth, and hence to how Capital as the Automatic Fetish is socially constituted. The exploitative social relation – namely, the ‘consumption’ of living labour power, with human beings regarded as nothing but the bearers of labour power – turns into society as totalitarian domination. While the social characteristics of labour present themselves as objective properties of things, ‘suffering’ is the experiential correlate of how the fetish character of money, value, and capital spreads fetishist illusions. Reclaiming Marx’s critique of political economy as a critique of society, in the way O’Kane does, is essential for a political project that goes beyond emancipation towards liberation.”—Riccardo Bellofiore, University of Bergamo (retired) “For me, Chris O’Kane’s work in critical social theory is synonymous with the Marx revival. It’s not just a matter of O’Kane’s subtle reading of canonical works of western Marxism and critical theory (and beyond), where old-fashioned erudition is animated by the life and death stakes of actually existing capitalist society. It’s also that O’Kane’s historical judgement on those theoretical trajectories is impeccable: his take on the relationship between different approaches; on why certain concepts resonate differently over time; on why one formulation is remaindered while another rises to the surface for debate once again; and so on. O’Kane’s cult-like following among contemporary Marxist and critical theorists is completely earned and deserved.” —Beverley Best, Concordia University“Chris O’Kane’s masterful critique of fetishism as a reality of violence is a testament to the power of critical thought that, against the doctrinaire certainty of traditional Marxist critique, insists on deciphering capitalist domination as a social form of impersonal power.” —Werner Bonefeld, Professor Emeritus, University of York (UK)