{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611","title":"Critical Theory of Communication New Readings of Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas in the Age of the Internet","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781911534044","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611","id":"dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611","uuid":"dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611","title":"Critical Theory of Communication New Readings of Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas in the Age of the Internet","normalized_title":"criticaltheoryofcommunicationnewreadingsoflukácsadornomarcusehonnethandhabermasintheageoftheinternet","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781911534044","isbns":["9781911534044","9781911534051","9781911534068","9781911534075"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":236,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Critical%20Theory%20of%20Communication%20New%20Readings%20of%20Luk%C3%A1cs%2C%20Adorno%2C%20Marcuse%2C%20Honneth%20and%20Habermas%20in%20the%20Age%20of%20the%20Internet","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611/search"},"page":{"printed_page":18,"pdf_page":22,"physical_index":22,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"eee9d37ed3b9c66f41fd85438f19a2996383996c07514858f7cff7d4f3b4432e"},"chapter":"C H R I S T I A N F U C H S CRITICAL THEORY OF COMMUNICATION","content":"1.2.11. Werner Bonefeld’s Critical Theory\n\nWerner Bonefeld is a professor of politics at York University. He has been influenced by Adorno and the Frankfurt School and has together with people such as John Holloway, Richard Gunn and Kosmas Psychopedis established the open Marxism approach. He is one of the thinkers, who have made an interesting contribution to the development of contemporary critical theory. In his book Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy, Bonefeld (2014) provides for example a criticism of the logic that the enemy of one’s enemy is one’s friend, an analysis of the diference between racism and anti-Semitism, and argues that primitive accumulation is a continuous feature of capital because workers separation from the products and the surplus-value they create is inherent in capital accumulation itself. He also makes the point that ‘class is the critical category of the entire system of capitalist wealth’ (102) so that labour and capital appear ‘on the labour market as equal subjects’, which ‘masks their fundamental inequality’ (106). ‘Violence hides in the civilized form of the equivalence exchange relations as economic compulsion’ (95).\n\nBonefeld stresses that abstract labour is a category specific for capitalism and cannot be a transhistorical category, because then the double character of labour as abstract and concrete labour could not be a defining feature of capitalist commodity production. The demand for praxis that is based on the insight that the ‘whole has to go’ (223) is for Bonefeld one of critical theory’s inherent features. ‘Critical theory demands a praxis that fights barbarism and argues that in hell everything is hellish’ (222). Engaging with Bonefeld’s writing is an inspiring endeavour for anyone interested in critical theory.\n\nCritical theory is for Bonefeld anti-reifying thinking that deconstructs fetishisms. ‘The critique of political economy is thus subversive of the reified economic categories’ (38). Bourgeois economics would present contemporary economic life as natural economic laws and would thereby disregard that such laws’ ‘validity is fundamentally social, and they are valid in and through society and society is always concrete society’ (26).\n\nFor the critique of political economy the critical issue is thus not the discovery of general economic laws of history. Rather, its object of critique is the existent society, in which definite social relations subsist in the form of abstract economic forces, things endowed with an invisible will that “asserts itself as a regulative law of nature” (27).\n\n18\n\nCritical Theory of Communication","previous_page":17,"next_page":19}