Critical Theory and the Critique of Society – serie

Bringing together the various heterodox traditions, groups and scholars that came under the heading of Open Marxism for the first time, this book assesses the evolution of Open Marxism from the initial usage of the term by Kostas Axelos in France in the 1950s and the journal, Arguments, principally the ‘anarchist Marx’ of Maximilien Rubel and the ‘Libertarian Marxism’ of Daniel Guérin, through Open Marxism as it was developed in Eastern Europe, especially in the scholarly work of Karel Kosik in Czechoslovakia, the work of the Polish Open Marxists and the Praxis group in Yugoslavia, to Johannes Agnoli’s work in post-1968 (West) Germany, and finally to the work developed by Bonefeld, Clarke, Gunn and Holloway within the framework of the Conference of Socialist Economists (CSE) in Britain since the 1980s.Its comprehensive study of the historical development of Open Marxism in all its various guises and forms reasserts the rich insights of its devastating critique of social democracy, Leninism-Stalinism and the Althusserian structuralist paradigm. It introduces a new readership to Open Marxism’s negative, fundamental, and destructive critique of capitalism and examines the practical relevance of its subversive thinking to the contemporary struggle for a free and open socialist society.

Commentators across the political spectrum have argued that the future has been absorbed by an ever-expanding present to which we cannot imagine alternatives. The notion that we have lost the ability to imagine change—culturally, socially, and politically—has become one of the defining problems of our time. But what is the difference between the populist narratives of those who promise to solve this problem by returning us to a glorious past and those who promise to lead us into a glorious future? Often, this book argues, not very much at all. Revealing neo-authoritarianism and capitalist hyper-innovation as two sides of the same coin, Mathias Nilges shows that today's reactionaries and futurists both harness and profit from the same temporal crises of our present.Looking to design, popular culture, literature, and recent theoretical and political discussions, Nilges offers ways of understanding the re-emergence of familiar and disturbing forms of right-wing politics and culture (authoritarianism, paternalism, fascism) not as historical repetition but as dangerous consequences of the contradictions of capitalism today. Using critical theory, in particular the work of Ernst Bloch, this book recovers a politics and culture of hope, which it locates beyond a future that is colonized by capitalism and a past that becomes the mystical playground for the new Right:in that which was never allowed to be and thus demands realization.

The first book to investigate the relevance of Theodor W. Adorno’s work for theorizing the age of neoliberal capitalism. Through an engagement with Adorno’s critical theory of society, Charles Prusik advances a novel approach to understanding the origins and development of neoliberalism. Offering a corrective to critics who define neoliberalism as an economic or political doctrine, Prusik argues that Adorno’s dialectical theory of society can provide the basis for explaining the illusions and forms of domination that structure contemporary life. Prusik explains the importance of Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism in shaping Adorno’s work and focuses on the related concepts of exchange, ideology, and natural history as powerful tools for grasping the present. Through an engagement with the ideas of neoliberal economic theory, Adorno and Neoliberalism criticizes the naturalization of capitalist institutions, social relations, ideology, and cultural forms. Revealing its origins in the crises of the Fordist period, Prusik develops Adorno’s analyses of class, exploitation, monopoly, and reification to situate neoliberal policies as belonging to the fundamental antagonisms of capitalist society.

Revisiting Guy Debord’s seminal work, The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Eric-John Russell breathes new life into a text which directly preceded and informed the revolutionary fervour of May 1968. Deepening the analysis between Debord and Marx by revealing the centrality of Hegel’s speculative logic to both, he traces Debord’s intellectual debt to Hegel in a way that treads new ground for critical theory. Drawing extensively from The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and Science of Logic (1812), this book illustrates the lasting impact of Debord’s critical theory of 20th-century capitalism and reveals new possibilities for the critique of capitalism.

Challenging the normalization of a capitalist reality in which environmental destruction and catastrophe have become ‘second nature’, Towards a Critical Theory of Nature offers a bold new theoretical understanding of the current crisis via the work of the Frankfurt School. Focusing on key notions of dialectics, natural history, and materialism, a critical theory of nature is outlined in favor of a more traditional Marxist theory of nature, albeit one which still builds on core Marxist concepts to confirm humanity’s central place in manufacturing environmental misery. Pre-eminent thinkers of the Frankfurt school, including, Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, and Alfred Schmidt, are highlighted for their potential to diagnose the interpenetration of capitalism and nature in a way that neither absolutizes nor obliterates the boundary between the social and natural. Further theoretical claims and practical consequences of a critical theory of nature challenge other contemporary theoretical approaches like eco-Marxism, social constructivism and new materialism, to situate it as the only approach with genuinely radical potential. The possibility of utopian idealism for understanding and responding to the current climate crisis is carefully measured against the dangers of false hope in setting out realistic goals for change. Environmental change in turn is seen through the prism of recent cultural currents and movements, situating the power of a critical theory of nature in relation to understandings of the Anthropocene; concepts of apocalypse, and postapocalypse. This book culminates in a powerful tool for an anti-capitalist critique of society’s painfully extractive relationship to a deceptively abstracted natural world.

Addressing the contradictions inherent in the social form of capitalist labour which dominates society today, Fabian Arzuaga outlines the complex relationship between individualism and labour. By reconstructing critical theory as the critique of political economy in the work of Theodor W. Adorno and Karl Marx, Arzuaga reveals the tension in the system which leads to the loss of individualism, at the same time as it lays the foundations for emancipation from it. Joining up the work of Marx and Adorno in this way illuminates and speaks to current debates around universal basic income, automation, surplus populations, and the growing interest in post-work imaginaries.By outlining the temporal logic of capital, the means of social reproduction that hinge on the unlimited creation of surplus value, are challenged and brought into question. From this base, a post-work society in which labour in its prevailing social form is abolished, is imagined and made possible. In this society, the means of subsistence would no longer be tied to labour and the promise of individuality could be redeemed for what Marx termed the ‘social individual’. Instead of simply being an ideological tool of liberalism, ‘individuality’ in Arzuaga’s formulation becomes its own critical category—able to grasp the present while radically pointing beyond itself.

Exploring the connections between Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history and a Marxian Critique of Political Economy, Duy Lap Nguyen analyses Benjamin’s early writings and their development into a distinct understanding of historical materialism. Benjamin’s historically materialist conception of history is shown to be characterised by a focus on the religion of capitalism, the mythology of the state, and messianic time. Revealing these factors, Nguyen joins up Benjamin’s philosophical critique of the Kantian conception of history, alongside the historical trajectory of capitalism he subscribed to. Influenced by the theory of fascism outlined by German Marxist theorist Karl Korsch, we see how Benjamin’s own theory of revolution and redemption in capitalist society developed into a sophisticated critique. Essential to Benjamin’s materialist critique was a recognition of the fallibility of the Enlightenment notion of progress, as well as the need to overturn the political and economic catastrophes which enable capitalism and fascism to thrive. In mapping the exact course of Benjamin’s critical historical materialism, Nguyen fully explicates the unique contribution he made to western Marxism.

While Adorno has tended to be read as a critic of the administered world and the consumer industry rather than a Marxist, Adorno and Marx establishes Adorno’s negative dialectics as fundamental for understanding Marx’s critique of political economy. This conception of the critique of political economy as a critical theory marks both a radical departure from traditional Marxist scholarship and from traditional readings of Adorno’s work and warns against identifying Adorno with Marx or Marx with Adorno. Rather, it highlights the intersection between Adorno’s critical theory and Marx’s critique of political economy that produces a critical theory of economic objectivity that moves beyond Marxian economics and Adornonian social theory.Adorno and Marx offers an ingenious account of critical social theory. Its subversion of the economic categories of political economy contributes to the cutting-edge of contemporary social theory and its critique of social practice.

While Adorno has tended to be read as a critic of the administered world and the consumer industry rather than a Marxist, Adorno and Marx establishes Adorno’s negative dialectics as fundamental for understanding Marx’s critique of political economy. This conception of the critique of political economy as a critical theory marks both a radical departure from traditional Marxist scholarship and from traditional readings of Adorno’s work and warns against identifying Adorno with Marx or Marx with Adorno. Rather, it highlights the intersection between Adorno’s critical theory and Marx’s critique of political economy that produces a critical theory of economic objectivity that moves beyond Marxian economics and Adornonian social theory.Adorno and Marx offers an ingenious account of critical social theory. Its subversion of the economic categories of political economy contributes to the cutting-edge of contemporary social theory and its critique of social practice.

The first book to investigate the relevance of Theodor W. Adorno’s work for theorizing the age of neoliberal capitalism. Through an engagement with Adorno’s critical theory of society, Charles Prusik advances a novel approach to understanding the origins and development of neoliberalism. Offering a corrective to critics who define neoliberalism as an economic or political doctrine, Prusik argues that Adorno’s dialectical theory of society can provide the basis for explaining the illusions and forms of domination that structure contemporary life. Prusik explains the importance of Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism in shaping Adorno’s work and focuses on the related concepts of exchange, ideology, and natural history as powerful tools for grasping the present. Through an engagement with the ideas of neoliberal economic theory, Adorno and Neoliberalism criticizes the naturalization of capitalist institutions, social relations, ideology, and cultural forms. Revealing its origins in the crises of the Fordist period, Prusik develops Adorno’s analyses of class, exploitation, monopoly, and reification to situate neoliberal policies as belonging to the fundamental antagonisms of capitalist society.

Challenging the normalization of a capitalist reality in which environmental destruction and catastrophe have become ‘second nature’, Towards a Critical Theory of Nature offers a bold new theoretical understanding of the current crisis via the work of the Frankfurt School. Focusing on key notions of dialectics, natural history, and materialism, a critical theory of nature is outlined in favor of a more traditional Marxist theory of nature, albeit one which still builds on core Marxist concepts to confirm humanity’s central place in manufacturing environmental misery. Pre-eminent thinkers of the Frankfurt school, including, Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, and Alfred Schmidt, are highlighted for their potential to diagnose the interpenetration of capitalism and nature in a way that neither absolutizes nor obliterates the boundary between the social and natural. Further theoretical claims and practical consequences of a critical theory of nature challenge other contemporary theoretical approaches like eco-Marxism, social constructivism and new materialism, to situate it as the only approach with genuinely radical potential. The possibility of utopian idealism for understanding and responding to the current climate crisis is carefully measured against the dangers of false hope in setting out realistic goals for change. Environmental change in turn is seen through the prism of recent cultural currents and movements, situating the power of a critical theory of nature in relation to understandings of the Anthropocene; concepts of apocalypse, and postapocalypse. This book culminates in a powerful tool for an anti-capitalist critique of society’s painfully extractive relationship to a deceptively abstracted natural world.

Revisiting Guy Debord’s seminal work, The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Eric-John Russell breathes new life into a text which directly preceded and informed the revolutionary fervour of May 1968. Deepening the analysis between Debord and Marx by revealing the centrality of Hegel’s speculative logic to both, he traces Debord’s intellectual debt to Hegel in a way that treads new ground for critical theory. Drawing extensively from The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and Science of Logic (1812), this book illustrates the lasting impact of Debord’s critical theory of 20th-century capitalism and reveals new possibilities for the critique of capitalism.

Commentators across the political spectrum have argued that the future has been absorbed by an ever-expanding present to which we cannot imagine alternatives. The notion that we have lost the ability to imagine change—culturally, socially, and politically—has become one of the defining problems of our time. But what is the difference between the populist narratives of those who promise to solve this problem by returning us to a glorious past and those who promise to lead us into a glorious future? Often, this book argues, not very much at all. Revealing neo-authoritarianism and capitalist hyper-innovation as two sides of the same coin, Mathias Nilges shows that today's reactionaries and futurists both harness and profit from the same temporal crises of our present.Looking to design, popular culture, literature, and recent theoretical and political discussions, Nilges offers ways of understanding the re-emergence of familiar and disturbing forms of right-wing politics and culture (authoritarianism, paternalism, fascism) not as historical repetition but as dangerous consequences of the contradictions of capitalism today. Using critical theory, in particular the work of Ernst Bloch, this book recovers a politics and culture of hope, which it locates beyond a future that is colonized by capitalism and a past that becomes the mystical playground for the new Right:in that which was never allowed to be and thus demands realization.

This volume provides a systematic re-examination of the Frankfurt School's theory of antisemitism and, employing this critical theory, investigates the presence of antisemitism in 20th- and 21st-century politics and society.Critical Theory and the Critique of Antisemitism uncovers how critical theory differs from mainstream socialist or liberal critiques of antisemitism, as it frames its rejection of antisemitism in the critique of other aspects of modern capitalist society, which traditional theories leave unchallenged or critique only in passing. Amongst others, these include issues of identity, nation, race, and sexuality. In exploring the Frankfurt School's writings on antisemitism therefore, the chapters in this book reveal connections to other pressing societal issues, such as racism more broadly, patriarchy, statism, and the societal dynamics of the ever-evolving capitalist mode of production.Putting the theory to practice, this volume brings together interdisciplinary scholars and activists who employ critical theory to scrutinise right- and left-wing manifestations of antisemitism. They develop, in their critique of antisemitism, a critique of capitalism, as the authors ask: why does modern capitalist society seem bound to produce antisemitism? And how do we challenge it?At a time when the rise of populism internationally has brought with it new strains of antisemitism, this is an essential resource that demonstrates the continuing relevance of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School for the struggle against antisemitism today.

This volume provides a systematic re-examination of the Frankfurt School's theory of antisemitism and, employing this critical theory, investigates the presence of antisemitism in 20th- and 21st-century politics and society.Critical Theory and the Critique of Antisemitism uncovers how critical theory differs from mainstream socialist or liberal critiques of antisemitism, as it frames its rejection of antisemitism in the critique of other aspects of modern capitalist society, which traditional theories leave unchallenged or critique only in passing. Amongst others, these include issues of identity, nation, race, and sexuality. In exploring the Frankfurt School's writings on antisemitism therefore, the chapters in this book reveal connections to other pressing societal issues, such as racism more broadly, patriarchy, statism, and the societal dynamics of the ever-evolving capitalist mode of production.Putting the theory to practice, this volume brings together interdisciplinary scholars and activists who employ critical theory to scrutinise right- and left-wing manifestations of antisemitism. They develop, in their critique of antisemitism, a critique of capitalism, as the authors ask: why does modern capitalist society seem bound to produce antisemitism? And how do we challenge it?At a time when the rise of populism internationally has brought with it new strains of antisemitism, this is an essential resource that demonstrates the continuing relevance of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School for the struggle against antisemitism today.

Exploring the connections between Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history and a Marxian Critique of Political Economy, Duy Lap Nguyen analyses Benjamin’s early writings and their development into a distinct understanding of historical materialism. Benjamin’s historically materialist conception of history is shown to be characterised by a focus on the religion of capitalism, the mythology of the state, and messianic time. Revealing these factors, Nguyen joins up Benjamin’s philosophical critique of the Kantian conception of history, alongside the historical trajectory of capitalism he subscribed to. Influenced by the theory of fascism outlined by German Marxist theorist Karl Korsch, we see how Benjamin’s own theory of revolution and redemption in capitalist society developed into a sophisticated critique. Essential to Benjamin’s materialist critique was a recognition of the fallibility of the Enlightenment notion of progress, as well as the need to overturn the political and economic catastrophes which enable capitalism and fascism to thrive. In mapping the exact course of Benjamin’s critical historical materialism, Nguyen fully explicates the unique contribution he made to western Marxism.

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.

A Critical Theory of Societal Domination offers a major reinterpretation of Frankfurt School Critical Theory and its relation to Marx’s critique of political economy. Challenging the dominant Anglophone narrative that portrays early Horkheimer and late Adorno as pessimistic cultural critics superseded by Habermasian theory or contemporary “Marxism as Critical Theory,” Chris O’Kane reconstructs their work as the foundation of a distinctive, heterodox Marxian critical theory of capitalist social domination.At the centre of the book is the argument that Horkheimer and Adorno developed an immanent, self-reflexive critique of capitalism grounded in Marx’s critique of political economy. Far from abandoning political economy or praxis, their critical theory understands capitalist society as a historically specific concrete negative totality in which economy, state, culture, family, and subjectivity are internally mediated by the exchange relation. Capitalist domination is thus conceived not as an external force imposed on otherwise emancipatory social spheres, but as a form of objective and subjective domination reproduced through free and equal capitalist social practice itself.Moreover the book challenges the view that Horkheimer and Adorno's critical theory was superseded, underlining their influence on the twentieth century's resurgence in Marxian thought by mapping their influence on the work of Alfred Schmidt, Hans-Georg Backhaus, Helmut Rechelt, Moishe Postone and Werner Bonefeld – all thinkers who critically developed this approach into an active research programme in critical theory.Finally, O’Kane outlines this further development of the critical theory of capitalist social domination and demonstrates its central importance for a critical theory of capitalism today by drawing thon the work of these figures and other contemporary critical theorists.

Bringing together the various heterodox traditions, groups and scholars that came under the heading of Open Marxism for the first time, this book assesses the evolution of Open Marxism from the initial usage of the term by Kostas Axelos in France in the 1950s and the journal, Arguments, principally the ‘anarchist Marx’ of Maximilien Rubel and the ‘Libertarian Marxism’ of Daniel Guérin, through Open Marxism as it was developed in Eastern Europe, especially in the scholarly work of Karel Kosik in Czechoslovakia, the work of the Polish Open Marxists and the Praxis group in Yugoslavia, to Johannes Agnoli’s work in post-1968 (West) Germany, and finally to the work developed by Bonefeld, Clarke, Gunn and Holloway within the framework of the Conference of Socialist Economists (CSE) in Britain since the 1980s.Its comprehensive study of the historical development of Open Marxism in all its various guises and forms reasserts the rich insights of its devastating critique of social democracy, Leninism-Stalinism and the Althusserian structuralist paradigm. It introduces a new readership to Open Marxism’s negative, fundamental, and destructive critique of capitalism and examines the practical relevance of its subversive thinking to the contemporary struggle for a free and open socialist society.

'Life does not live.'This certainty – that the conditions governing existence in contemporary societies generate irretrievably damaged lives – lies at the heart of Theodor W. Adorno's critical theory. Emerging from the historical experience of fascism, Auschwitz, and the consolidation of advanced capitalism, Adorno’s thought articulates critique from within a damaged reality.Under the coercion of overwhelming social powers, individual character is constituted as a “system of scars”. This notion of “damaged life” stands at the center of this book, which frames critique as emerging from a reality scarred by systemic coercion. It reconstructs Adorno’s critical theory as an analysis of the new state of unfreedom linked to total socialization, the anthropological reshaping of subjectivity under advanced capitalism, and the very possibility of critique.Jordi Maiso's analysis spans key themes: the constellation of fascism and advanced capitalism, the culture industry's role in shaping consciousness, and the persistence of authoritarian potential in everyday life. Revisiting Adorno’s conception of critique as a “science of mourning” and his insistence on determinate negation, the book shows how critical thought confronts a historical moment in which emancipatory horizons appear blocked yet remain necessary.Both historical and urgent, From Damaged Life: The Critical Theory of Theodor W. Adorno interrogates the persistence of fear, heteronomy, and avoidable suffering. It asks whether, under conditions marked by authoritarian regression and damaged subjectivity, critical theory can still resist resignation and keep the possibility of transformation alive.