The Adventures of the Commodity: For a Critique of Value

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Anselm Jappe (Fine Arts Academy, Italy) Chris O'Kane (University of Texas Rio Grande Valley USA)

The Adventures of the Commodity

For a Critique of Value

Anselm Jappe (Fine Arts Academy, Italy), Chris O'Kane (University of Texas Rio Grande Valley USA), Werner Bonefeld (University of York UK)

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English

Bloomsbury Academic
29 May 2025

Philosophy; Social & political philosophy; History of ideas; Economic theory & philosophy

Series: Critical Theory and the Critique of Society

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.

By: Anselm Jappe (Fine Arts Academy Italy)
Edited by: Chris O'Kane (University of Texas Rio Grande Valley USA), Werner Bonefeld (University of York UK)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 232mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 16mm
Weight: 340g
ISBN: 9781350381186
ISBN 10: 1350381187
Series: Critical Theory and the Critique of Society
Pages: 232
Publication Date: 29 May 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Introduction: Is the World a Commodity? 1. This Stranger the Commodity 2. Critique of Labour 3. The Crisis of Market Society 4. The History and Metaphysics of the Commodity 5. Fetishism and Anthropology Conclusion: Some ‘False-Friends’ References Index

Anselm Jappe is Professor of Philosophy and teacher of aesthetics at the Fine Arts Academy, Italy. He is a key theorist of the critique of value-dissociation and also a leading researcher on the Situationist International. He is the author of numerous works of anti-capitalist critical theory such as Guy Debord (1993), L’avant-garde inacceptable (2005) and The Writing on the Wall: On The Decomposition of Capitalism and its Critics (2017).

Reviews for The Adventures of the Commodity: For a Critique of Value

"""Anselm Jappe is one of the most gifted thinkers of the ""value theory"" current, which wants to understand the capitalist system, based on abstract labor and money, a blind and impersonal system that reduces everything to a commodity. This essay is more than ever relevant today, when the logic of infinite value accumulation is leading to an ecological catastrophe."" --Michael L�wy, Emeritus Research Director, French National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS), France ""The Adventures of the Commodity provides a necessary introduction to the critique of value for the anglophone world, a correct assessment of the complex dynamics of capitalist society at its most fundamental level. The logical approach offers a reliable means of diagnosing current tendencies in a society constrained by certain logical perimeters imposed by the capitalist mode of production."" --Marx & Philosophy Review of Books"