“Society maintains itself despite all the catastrophes that may eventuate”: Critical theory, negative totality, and crisis

Climate barbarism: Adapting to a wrong world

“…Alongside the “ecological Marxism” of Bellamy Foster (2000), Clark et al (2010), Burkett (2014), Moore (2015), Malm (2016), and Saito (2017), I hope to contribute a “social form” analysis of climate change. Inspired by Theodor Adorno (1973), Alfred Schmidt (1971), and Moishe Postone (1993), I argue that a critical theory of climate change should move beyond the moral condemnation of “greedy” individuals and corporations for ruining the planet, and instead approach the question from the perspective of social form , that is, the specific ways in which the form‐determinations of capital, value, money, and the commodity practically invert our relation to ourselves and nonhuman nature (in this regard, see O'Kane, 2018; Cassegård, 2017, 2021). Climate change, on this account, is not a separate catastrophe from others—such as the crisis of biodiversity, the sixth mass extinction, the proliferation of pandemics like Covid‐19, deforestation, ocean acidification—but part of an ongoing ecological rift of the social metabolism with nature, itself determined by the specific logic of capitalist accumulation and the real subsumption of human labor under the form of value.…”

Adorno, Marx, and abstract domination

“…1 See Benhabib (1986) for an authoritative documentation of this shift. 2 For a few notable exceptions, see Arzuaga (2019), Cook (2018), O'Kane (2018a, 2018b, Osborne (2020), and Prusik (2020). 3 Value critique represents a loose tradition of theorists who in the 1960s began to reconstruct a Marxian theory from the basic categories of Marx's work, as categories specific and essential to the capitalist totality.…”

“…2For a few notable exceptions, see Arzuaga (2019), Cook (2018), O’Kane (2018a, 2018b), Osborne (2020), and Prusik (2020).…”