Reification and Real Abstraction in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy

Elbe, Ingo

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-39954-2_14

Cited by 4 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 7 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…However, commodity exchange is not just an external force of economic dominance in society. From a value-form Marxian perspective, economic categories attain a fetish-like appearance of a reified form of social relations of production (Elbe, 2020; Heinrich, 2009; Murray, 2016; Reuten, 1988). In that sense, it is not the false dualism and dominance of objectified economics over subjective life worlds that demand our attention.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Frankfurt School Legacy and the Critical Sociology of Media: Lifeworld in Digital Capitalism

Bilić

2023

Critical Sociology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Just as the Frankfurt School responded to the radicalisation of the working class in Germany and the rise of post-war consumerism in the United States, today, we are confronted by platform monopolies, automated hyper-consumption and technological control. Critical approaches to digital media have exposed the structural coupling of Internet use and capital accumulation for almost two decades. However, many authors building on this tradition can struggle to understand how online social interaction is controlled beyond the worn-out critique of false consciousness or beyond conceptualising all digital activity mediated by data as labour. This paper will attempt to theoretically untangle the Marxian ontology of labour and the Frankfurt School-inspired critique of everyday life. This is not just theoretical nit-picking. Society becomes completely dominated if we accept no difference between wage labour and lifeworld activities. Each contains its internal struggles. The value form regulates both in different ways.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, Lukács merges fundamental categories of value theory (abstract labour, the commodity form, the fetish character of the commodity) and the concept of real subsumption of the labour process under capital. This led him to an idealist understanding of social relations as mental things with an irrational social ontology (Elbe, 2020: 250).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Frankfurt School Legacy and the Critical Sociology of Media: Lifeworld in Digital Capitalism

Bilić

2023

Critical Sociology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Real abstraction is crucially related to the concepts of reification and commodity fetishism and the theory of alienation in Marxism (Elbe 2020). Reification, developed most prominently by Georg Lukács (1972) in History and Class Consciousness, refers "to the moment that a process or relation is generalized into an abstraction, and thereby turned into a 'thing'" (Bewes 2002: 3).…”

Section: Depoliticization and Real Abstractionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The spatial politics of depoliticization: Visionary planning, bioeconomy, and forest capital

Kellokumpu

2023

NGP

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Depoliticization is a pivotal political strategy that defines the contemporary governance of core capitalist democracies. This thesis asks how depoliticization manifests itself as a political strategy in the spatial restructuring of the Finnish state space. The spatial politics of depoliticization are examined by the three thesis articles, which focus on visionary planning in urban politics, the legitimation of the forest bioeconomy in the public sphere, and Finnish forest capital’s attempt to influence the state’s strategic direction. These perspectives provide a holistic view of the various depoliticizing and politicizing tendencies, as well as the political and economic contradictions affecting spatial change in Finland. The thesis examines the societal base of depoliticization by focusing on how capitalist social relations and the capitalist mode of production condition the constitution and differentiation of societal spheres. The differentiation of the economic and the political sphere and the resulting ecological dominance of “the economy” under capitalism provides a unique setting for depoliticization to appear in the form of economization. Acts of demarcation between the political and the economic spheres are based on ontological abstraction, which then faces humanity as a real and concrete product of social activity. The thesis applies strategic-relational state theory and the theories of uneven development to examine depoliticization. Depoliticization emerges in the context of competing growth models that have a diverging conception of the spatial division of labor in Finland. Amidst urbanization, the urban growth-focused city-regionalist model posits a “winner takes all” spatial structure in which a few select urban areas compete against their global counterparts to attract capital and investment. In contrast, the bioeconomy model seeks to halt the rural decline by transforming the resource-dependent regional economies into ostensibly more sustainable production models, thereby reinvigorating a dispersed spatial structure. Article I analyzes the depoliticization of visionary planning in the case of the Oulu City Center Vision 2040 project by observing and engaging with policy documentation, research reports, planning events, and the vision itself. Article II examines the depoliticization of the bioeconomy in the context of the 2019 parliamentary elections in Finland through a collection of newspaper articles and items between July 2018 and January 2020. Article III investigates the forest conglomerate UPM’s attempt to politicize the Kaipola paper mill shutdown in August 2020 by using statistical data, the public strategies of UPM, and the online and news media around the Kaipola debate. The cultural political economy (CPE) approach developed prominently by Jessop and Sum forms the overarching methodological framework of the thesis and focuses on the dialectics of materiality and discursivity in political-economic imaginaries. The thesis applies CPE-inspired critical discourse analysis to examine the spatial politics of depoliticization. The overall contribution of the thesis reveals how the material interdependence of the political sphere with other societal spheres and the social totality of capitalist society produces a specific place for politics that conditions its operational autonomy. The spatial politics of depoliticization are unfolded through the divergent political-economic imaginaries of state spatial development to which different capital fractions, political parties, and regional and class interests are attached. Conceptual stretching and expansive uses of depoliticization are recognized as key and very vexatious problems in the literature. To retain the analytical clarity of depoliticization, the thesis argues that depoliticization should be better grounded in the material developments of each context, evading pan-politicism with more exclusive notions of politics, and even radically decentering politics and the political in the analyses of depoliticization. The normative critique of depoliticization should move from the level of critiquing politics to a critique of the social totality which produces a specific place for politics.

show abstract

“…One of the most striking aspects of Marx on Money (de Brunhoff 1976a), as well as Suzanne de Brunhoff’s other books, is their discrepancy from other well-known readings of the first section of Capital : whether Friedrich Engels’s understanding of it as the historical reconstruction of the simple market mode of production, or the Neue Marx Lektüre interpretation, which makes it the theoretical exposition of the value-form (Elbe 2013). While most approaches to money in Marx seem to be based on a cursive reading of this section, and Althusser famously recommended to skip it when reading Capital for the first time, de Brunhoff writes: “All who want to understand the whole contribution of Marx’s historical materialism should read the first section, of Volume 1 of Capital, where a theory of commodities and money is presented” (de Brunhoff 1976a, p. 125).…”

Section: De Brunhoff’s Creative Orthodoxy Against Monetary Heterodoxymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Time-Spaces of Capitalism: Suzanne De Brunhoff and Monetary Thought After Marx

Baronian¹

2021

J Hist Econ Thought

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The paper is dedicated to Suzanne de Brunhoff’s monetary thought and shows how her analysis of very concrete monetary and financial problems of her time led her to develop the most innovative contributions to Marxist theory of money since classical Marxism. Concepts such as non-contemporaneity of capitalism with itself, pseudo-social validation, conflict centralization, or State management of money and labor power reflect her profound analysis of the ways capitalism generates very particular relations to space and time. By looking at this spatio-temporal dimension of de Brunhoff’s concepts, this paper aims to reveal the novelty, power, and fruitfulness of her monetary analysis. The first part of the paper seeks to define the meaning of the concept of general equivalent, drawing on her reading of Karl Marx’s Capital, before situating her approach in relation to institutionalist theories of money. The second part considers de Brunhoff’s analysis of the particular time-spaces of capitalism.

show abstract

Reification and Real Abstraction in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy

Cited by 4 publications

References 7 publications

Frankfurt School Legacy and the Critical Sociology of Media: Lifeworld in Digital Capitalism

Frankfurt School Legacy and the Critical Sociology of Media: Lifeworld in Digital Capitalism

The spatial politics of depoliticization: Visionary planning, bioeconomy, and forest capital

The Time-Spaces of Capitalism: Suzanne De Brunhoff and Monetary Thought After Marx

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About