The Adventures of the Commodity
For a Critique of Value
1st Edition
Published on 19. October 2023
232 pages
978-1-350-38120-9 (ISBN)
Description
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 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.
More details
Series
Edition
1. Auflage
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Target group
Professional and scholarly
ISBN-13
978-1-350-38120-9 (9781350381209)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
05/2025
Bloomsbury Academic
€43.90
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Book
11/2023
Bloomsbury Academic
€117.90
Shipment within 15-20 days
Person
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).
Content
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
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
