#bonefeld

[edwad]

Economic theory is the theory of society unaware of itself.

— Werner Bonefeld, Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason (2014)

[edwad]

The structuralist supposition of society does not comprehend society. It merely describes it abstractly as an hypothesized unit of analysis.

— Werner Bonefeld, Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason (2014)

[edwad]

The standpoint of labour does not reveal an ontologically priviliged position. Rather, the standpoint of labour is in every aspect tied to the capitalist economy of labour. Indeed, both the capitalist and the worker are ‘personifications of economic categories’. That is, ‘society stays alive, not despite its antagonism, but by means of it’. Against the grain of the classical Marxist tradition, I argue that the critique of political economy amounts to a critique of ontological conceptions of economic categories, including the category of labour as a trans-historically conceived activity that defines the human metabolism with nature in abstraction from society.

— Werner Bonefeld, Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason (2014)

[edwad]

In terms of a critical theory of political economy, it is not the independence of economic categories of cash and coin, value and money, as forces over and above, and also in and through the social individuals, that requires explanation. Rather, what needs to be explained are the social relations of production, which manifest themselves as a relationship between reified economic things that assert themselves behind the backs of those same individuals who comprise and sustain society. That is, reification is really ‘an epiphenomenon’. Critically conceived, the theory of reification does not substitute the religious idea of God for the logic of secularized things. Reification is either a critical concept that asks about the social constitution of reified relations or it is not, in which case it becomes affirmative in its grasp of society. Spellbound by the plight of the dispossessed in a system of wealth founded on dependent labour relations, the ‘tireless charge of reification’ is premised on the assumption that reification essentially has to do with reified things. In this case, then, ‘the protest against reification becomes reified, divorced from thinking, and irrational’. The critique of reification asks what is reified and what therefore appears in reification. What appear in reification are the social relations of production in the form of self-moving economic things. However reified in its appearance, the economic world is and remains a world of definite social relations.

— Werner Bonefeld, Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason (2014)

[edwad]

The circumstance that the capitalist social relations assume the form of a relationship between things and that the acting subjects therefore experience their own social world as a world that really is governed by the movement of economic things comprises the necessary ideology of society. Critically conceived, ideology is not just a view about the world. Rather, it is the ‘socially necessary appearance’ of definite social relations in the inverted form of real economic abstractions. The scientific presumption of capitalist social forms as overdetermined structures of general historical laws is therefore pure ideology. It transforms the appearance of society into a scientific norm.

— Werner Bonefeld, Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason (2014)

[trekkingtroll]

#bonefeld #westerwald #rheinlandpfalz #jagdhaus #heimat #photography #fotografie #handy#handyfotografie #iphone11pro #handyfotografie #trekkingtroll (hier: Bonefeld) https://www.instagram.com/p/CD9pXvDHN8d/?igshid=1mjolywsuwgkq