Anselm Jappe – författare

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.

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.

The 2008 global financial crisis has led to the re-emergence in public discourse of the idea that capitalism could end. For many, it was proof of the notion that capitalist civilisation has an endemic tendency towards crisis that will ultimately bring about its demise. Must we assume, however, that such an eventuality would inevitably result in the liberation of humanity, as many orthodox Marxists claim? Through a collection of specially revised essays, first published in France between 2007 and 2010, Anselm Jappe draws on the radical new perspective of "the critique of value" as a critical tool with which to understand today's world and to re-examine the question of human emancipation. The Writing on the Wall offers a powerful new analysis of the decomposition of capitalism and its critics.