Adventures of the Commodity, The: For a Critique of Value (Critical Theory and the Critique of Society)

✍ Scribed by Anselm Jappe

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2023
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 233
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Preface
Translator’s Acknowledgements
Introduction
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’
Notes
Preface
Introduction
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