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