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.
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
A searing critique and exploration of commodity society and how the life of a commodity shapes contemporary living.
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).
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 Löwy, 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*
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