Adorno and Marx: negative Dialectics and the critique of political economy

Abstract

The book Adorno and Marx: Negative Dialectics and the Critique of Political Economy, organized by Werner Bonefeld and Chris O'Kane, presents the recent intellectual history of a research program that understands the critique of political economy as a critical social theory. Bringing together successive generations of scholars, this approach has four main sources: (i) the Frankfurt School, notably the work of Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse; (ii) the analyses of “social form” presented at the Conference of Socialist Economists in the United Kingdom and summarized in the publications of Simon Clarke; (iii) the so-called New Reading of Marx, whose origin is associated with the work of Adorno's students - especially Hans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt - who sought to reconstruct Marxian theory, with special attention to the theory of value; and, finally, (iv) the contributions of the Open Marxism series, which aimed to free the critique of capitalism from the constant attempts to regulate it in favor of the working class.