7
Keywords
critical theory, real abstraction, critique, suffering, wealth, economic compulsion 
Abstract
The object of a critical theory of society is Man [Menschen] in her historically specific 
forms of life. The article argues against ontological conceptions of social labour and of 
economy. Instead it insists that historical materialism far from being a materialism of 
nature and history, is fundamentally a critique of the objectivity of the capitalist eco-
nomic categories. For a critical theory of society, the economic concept, capital as a 
process of the valorisation of value, is not a natural thing but a social relationship be-
tween persons that is mediated through things. The fetishism of commodities is real. In 
the mediated world the social individuals appear as personifications of the economic 
object; and yet there would be nothing without their social practices—of self-preserva-
tion. Human suffering is objectively mediated. The article concludes that suffering is 
the non-conceptual content of the concept of society as a process of valorisation. The 
sheer unrest of life is the social constituent of the economic object.
Beležke o bogastvu kot realni abstrakciji in kritiki trpljenja
Ključne besede
kritična teorija, realna abstrakcija, kritika, trpljenje, bogastvo, ekonomska prisila
Povzetek 
Predmet kritične teorije družbe je človek-bitje [Menschen] kot proizvajalec zgodovinsko 
specifičnih oblik življenja. Prispevek se zoperstavlja ontološki koncepciji družbenega 
dela in ekonomije in zagovarja tezo, da historični materializem nikakor ni materializem 
narave in zgodovine, marveč je v svojem temelju kritika objektivnosti kapitalističnih 
*  University of York, United Kingdom
werner.bonefeld@york.ac.uk | https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6709-5313
Werner Bonefeld*
Notes on Wealth as a Real Abstraction 
and the Critique of Suffering
Filozofski vestnik
issn 0353-4510 | Volume 45 | Number 1 | 2024 | 7–24
cc by-sa 4.0 | doi: 10.3986/fv.45.1.01
8
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ekonomskih kategorij. Za kritično teorijo družbe ekonomski koncept – kapital kot pro-
ces valorizacije vrednosti – ni preprosto neka »naravna« reč temveč družbeno razmerje 
med osebami, ki je posredovano kot razmerje med rečmi. Blagovni fetišizem je realen. 
V posredovanem svetu se posamezniki v družbi prikazujejo kot poosebitve ekonomske-
ga objekta; in vendar ne bi bilo nič brez njihovih družbenih praks – samo-ohranitve. 
Človeško trpljenje je objektivno posredovano. Prispevek podaja sklep, da je trpljenje 
ne-konceptualna vsebina koncepta družbe kot procesa valorizacije. Gola nemirnost ži-
vljenja je tako družbeni gradnik ekonomskega objekta.
∞
Given the current state of technical development, the 
fact that there are still countless millions who suffer 
hunger and want must be attributed to the forms of so-
cial production, the relations of production, not to the 
intrinsic difficulty of meeting people’s material needs.
—Theodor Adorno, On Interpretation: The Concept of 
Progress1
Immanuel Kant’s conception of Enlightenment as humanity’s exodus from 
self-imposed immaturity still possesses subversive cunning. Not only does he 
speak about self-imposed immaturity, that is Man-made immaturity, but he also 
sees humanity as a subject that can free herself from the immaturity of her so-
cial condition.2
The notion of Man emerging from self-imposed immaturity presupposes opposi-
tion to the existing social relations. Kant’s determination of the role of the schol-
ar acknowledged this. He argued that only that science is true which helps the 
common Man to her dignity.3 Kant therefore demanded from scholarly work that 
1 Theodor W. Adorno, “On Interpretation: The Concept of Progress (II),” in History and 
Freedom: Lectures 1964–1965, ed. Rolf Tiedermann, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: 
Polity, 2006), 144.
2 Man, with a capital “M,” is used here and throughout in the combined sense of Mensch, 
Menschheit and Menschlein—he/she/it or humanity as a concrete universal.
3 See Immanuel Kant, “Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse,” in Immanuel Kant’s sämmtliche 
Werke, ed. G. Hartenstein (Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1868), 8:625.
9
notes on wealth as a real abstraction and the critique of suffering
it reveals the true character of the political constitution and that failure to do so 
amounts to a deceitful publicity.4
Marx echoed Kant’s idea of Enlightenment when he argued that human history 
would begin once social relations existed in which humanity would no longer 
be held in bondage as a living means for the accumulation of capitalist wealth, 
but in which humanity would be an end in itself. Against the bourgeois ideal of 
abstract equality, which recognizes rich and poor as equal partners in wealth 
regardless of their inequality in property, Marx argued for an equality of human 
needs. He went further than Kant by arguing that the unveiling of the true char-
acter of the constituted relations of human “immaturity” is not sufficient. In 
fact, Marx did not conceive of the existing social relations as “immature” in re-
lation to the promise of their further development. Marx’s critical theory sets out 
to show that the capitalist labour economy comprises definite forms of human 
social practice and that it is therefore the social relations themselves, not their 
labour economy, that require revolutionising for the sake of a society, he calls it 
communism, in which humanity is a purpose, not a means.
Towards a Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion: Wealth, Suffering, 
Negation
Critical theory thinks against the flow of the world, at least that is its intention. 
The opposite of a critical theory of society is not uncritical theory, however. It 
is traditional theory, at least according to Max Horkheimer who invoked the no-
tion of a critical theory of society in his seminal essay “Traditional and Critical 
Theory” of 1937.5 If one were to summarise the difference between them, tradi-
tional theory, at its best, analyses the world of real (economic) abstractions to 
comprehend their political, economic, cultural, psychological, social, and his-
torical truth from various standpoints, including the standpoint of labour. By ar-
guing from the standpoint of labour, it establishes what society lacks in terms of 
4 See Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (New York: 
Abaris, 1979). The inspiration behind this opening of my argument is Johannes Agnoli’s 
“Destruction as the Determination of the Scholar in Miserable Times,” in Revolutionary 
Writing: Common Sense Essays in Post-Political Politics, ed. Werner Bonefeld (New York: 
Autonomedia, 2003), 25–37.
5 Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: 
Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (London: Continuum, 2002), 188–243.
10
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the justice and rationality of its labour organisation, and what therefore needs 
to be done to overcome what it finds to be deplorable in the capitalist labour 
economy. In contrast, critical theory scrutinises the untruth of the economic 
abstractions. It asks about the social constitution of the relations of economic 
compulsion. Instead, then, of “stating what society lacks” with respect to the 
rational organisation of its labour economy and instead of asking “what praxis 
must realize” to achieve a more perfect “version of industrial society,”6 Adorno’s 
and Marx’s critical theory of capitalist political economy highlights “what is de-
plorable about society and has to be abolished.”7 What really is the social logic 
that holds sway in capitalist society? In their judgement, capitalist society does 
not promise a freedom from want. Rather, it promises that the dispossessed, 
free traders in labour-power, will have to work for the profit of the buyer of their 
labour-power to make a living as exploitable human material. Indeed, they un-
derstand that both the capitalist and the labourer are subject to the relations of 
economic compulsion, which under the threat of bankruptcy compels the em-
ployer of labour-power to make a profit from the living labour of its seller. What 
holds sway in capitalist society is the law of value, that is the law of the valori-
sation of living labour. The law of value posits the necessity of money to beget 
more money, on the pain of ruin. Marx thus conceived of the social character of 
capitalist society as an “abstraction in action.”8 It is, as Slavoj Žižek put it in the 
context of the anti-austerity struggles in Greece during the Eurozone crisis, the 
“real of capital,” one which turns counter-hegemonic struggles for progressive 
ends into alternative strategies of capitalist development.9
Herbert Marcuse articulated the critical meaning of society as an “abstraction in 
action” well when he argued that in capitalist society the world manifests itself 
6 Wolfgang Streeck, How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System (London: Verso, 
2016), 2.
7 Matthias Benzer, “Social Critique in the Totally Socialized Society,” Philosophy and Social 
Criticism 37, no. 5 (June 2011): 588, https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453710393317. Benzer ar-
gues with reference to Adorno’s social theory.
8 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume Two, trans. David Fernbach 
(London: Penguin, 1978), 185.
9 Slavoj Žižek, “Should the Left’s Answer to Rightist Populism Really Be a ‘Me Too’? Part I,” 
The Philosophical Salon, October 15, 2018, http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/should-the-
lefts-answer-to-rightist-populism-really-be-a-me-too-part-i/#_edn1, para. 15.
11
notes on wealth as a real abstraction and the critique of suffering
“behind the backs of the individuals; yet it is their work.”10 On the one hand, 
the individuals owe their life to what society as a process of silent compulsion 
does to them. On the other, their endeavour to make a living furnishes society 
as a compelling abstraction with an independent consciousness and a will. The 
economic quantities move as if by their own volition beyond human control; 
and yet, their movement manifests the practices of the social individuals in the 
form of the economic object. With reference to the social classes, society as an 
abstraction in action entails, crudely put, that the social reproduction of the 
free labourers depends on how effective their living labour is exploited for prof-
it by the buyers of their labour-power. Profitable employers hire workers; un-
profitable employers go under. They shed labour. For those without independ-
ent means, free labourers, their access to the means of subsistence depends on 
achieving sustained wage income, the premise of which is the enrichment of 
the capitalist through the consumption of their labour-power, which they relin-
quished to him by agreeing on a contract of labour.
The money-form of capitalist wealth, money that yields more money, is the real 
power of society as a process of economic compulsion. Following Simon Clarke,
The drive to force down wages, intensify labour [. . .] is not a matter merely of the 
subjective motivation of the capitalist, but bears down on the capitalist with the 
objective force of competition [. . .]. Competition forces every capitalist to seek out 
means of reducing costs or accelerating the turnover of capital, the better to with-
stand immediate or anticipated competitive pressure. Thus, the individual capi-
talist is no less subject to the power of money than is the worker.11
That is to say, exploiting labour for profit is the means of avoiding competitive 
erosion, liquidation, and bankruptcy. These outcomes are particularly painful 
for the workers who, left without employment, find themselves cut off from the 
means of subsistence. Profit is primary. The satisfaction of needs is a sideshow. 
For the sake of maintaining waged-based access to the means of life, the valori-
10 Herbert Marcuse, Negations, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (London: Free Association Press, 
1988), 151.
11 Simon Clarke, Keynesianism, Monetarism and the Crisis of the State (Aldershot: Edward 
and Elgar, 1988), 100.
12
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sation of capital is primary, making money out of money from the living labour 
of a class of people who make a living as free traders in labour-power.
What is “cannot be true.”12 It is true that to reproduce herself, the worker “must 
produce surplus value. The only worker who is productive is one who produc-
es surplus value for the capitalist, or in other words contributes towards the 
self-valorisation of capital.”13 There is therefore a misfortune far worse than be-
ing a productive worker, and that is the misfortune of being a superfluous work-
er who, deprived of wage income, depends on the charity of others for her sub-
sistence. It is because of their freedom as sellers of labour-power that the free 
labourers are prevented from “running away.”14 Following Herbert Marcuse, the 
“lash of hunger” compels them to “sell their services” for the profit of another 
class of Man.15 The class struggle is not about abstract ideas like socialism. It is 
a struggle for access to “crude and material things” and it is struggle over the la-
bour process, effectively the conditions of exploitation.16
Forms of Critique: Forces of Production and Social Critique
The many variations in the Marxist tradition revolve around two contrasting 
readings of the critique of political economy. Commentators pose the critique 
of political economy as either a critique of capitalism from the standpoint of 
labour or a critique of the capitalist labour economy. According to the former, 
capitalism amounts to a historically specific mode of labour economy. This read-
ing argues for a socialist mode of labour economy as the progressive alternative 
to capitalism. Its conception of socialism is programmatic in that it advocates 
for a perfected system of labour organisation by means of central planning. 
According to the latter, the critique of political economy does not argue from the 
standpoint of labour. On the contrary, it amounts to a negative critique of the 
capitalist labour economy. Its critique lacks in programmatic features. Instead, 
12 Ernst Bloch, Grundfragen der Philosophie: Ausgewählte Schriften, Band I, ed. Johann Kreu-
zer (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1965), 336.
13 Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (Hamonds-
worth: Penguin, 1976), 644.
14 Marx, 719.
15 Marcuse, Negations, 225.
16 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry 
Zorn, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Pimlico, 1999), 254.
13
notes on wealth as a real abstraction and the critique of suffering
it holds that the conceptual content of the society of the free and equal might 
emerge from the negation of the capitalist relations, that is, the struggle against 
the social conditions of suffering.
According to the standpoint of labour critique of capitalism, labour economy 
is an ontological principle. It holds that humanity has to exchange with nature 
to satisfy her needs. It rejects capitalism as a crisis-prone system of labour ex-
ploitation for private gain and demands the emancipation of labour from capi-
talist domination in socialism. Its argument for socialism is founded on a theory 
of modes of production as historically specific organisational forms of labour 
economy. According to this point of view, since “in any form of society human 
beings productively expend their corporeal powers,” the critique of capitalist 
labour economy has to differentiate between the “generic materiality” of hu-
man life as the transhistorical presupposition of the modes of production and 
the specific capitalist “historical form of wealth.”17 The analytical focus of this 
critique of capitalism falls on “the contradictory unity between the materiality 
of human life and its historically-determined social forms.”18 That is, it views as 
historically active the relationship between the transhistorically conceived forc-
es of production and the historically specific social relations of production, as 
the decisive dynamic for the understanding of capitalism as a mode of produc-
tion in “ ‘transition to communism.’ ”19 Its conception of communism is found-
ed on an ontological conception of the capitalist labour economy, that is, it ar-
gues that labour is the foundation of human existence. Therewith it supposes 
a transhistorical materiality of labour, and it thus ontologises labour activity 
in capitalism as an expression of human essence, abstractly conceived.20 It ar-
17 Guido Starosta, “The Commodity-Form and the Dialectical Method: On the Structure of 
Marx’s Exposition in Chapter 1 of Capital,” Science and Society 72, no. 3 (July 2008): 31, 25, 
https://doi.org/10.1521/siso.2008.72.3.295.
18 Alex Kicillof and Guido Starosta, “On Materiality and Social Form: A Political Critique 
of Rubin’s Value-Form Theory,” Historical Materialism 15, no. 3 (2007): 24, https://doi.
org/10.1163/156920607X225852.
19 Paresh Chattopadhyay, “The Economic Content of Socialism: Marx vs. Lenin,” Review of 
Radical Political Economics 24, no. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 1992): 94, https://doi.org/10.1177/ 
048661349202400306; quoted in Kicillof and Starosta, 37.
20 What comes to mind is Adam Smith’s conception of a human propensity to truck and bar-
ter that for him is the natural dynamic behind the growth in social wealth through the in-
crease in labour productivity and the (technical and social) division of labour that it brings 
about. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. 
14
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gues for communism as a morally rational organization of the natural necessity 
of labour. In short, the argument for a socialist labour economy recognises the 
capitalist mode of production as an historically overdetermined mode of labour 
economy, which through its development of the economic forces compels his-
tory forward as the unleashed forces of production come into conflict with the 
capitalist relations, which become too small and narrow for them, thereby creat-
ing the objective conditions for transition to socialism.21 As a critique of capital-
ist political economy, the argument about a transhistorical materiality of labour 
economy is as fruitless as the conception of the productive forces as a historical 
subject. The conception of labour economy as the “transhistorical essence of 
social life,”22 which will be perfected in socialism in the interests of the workers 
through the application of state-socialist reason, is illusionary in its grasp of 
capitalist political economy. However, as a dystopia, it is no less real. It replaces 
the semblance of freedom in market mediated forms of social coercion by the 
freedom of state socialism as an unmediated form of social coercion.
Following Adorno, the critique of political economy from the standpoint of la-
bour perverts the critical intention of Marx’s historical materialism.23 In his view, 
it ontologises the capitalist labour economy and naturalises the capitalist eco-
nomic categories. The circumstance that Man needs to eat and has therefore to 
exchange with nature does not explain capitalism nor does capitalism derive 
from it. Man does not eat in the abstract.24 Nor does Man struggle for life in the 
abstract. The struggle for life, invoked by Marx (and Engels) as a history of class 
struggle, takes place in definite forms of society. Instead, then, of transposing 
“every given struggle into the phrase ‘struggle for life,’ ” Marx’s critical theory 
Edwin Cannan (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), 1:25. For an argument that Marxist eco-
nomics derives from classical political economy, see Simon Clarke, Marx, Marginalism and 
Modern Sociology: From Adam Smith to Max Weber (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992).
21 See, for example, Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (New Haven: Yale University Press, 
2011), 43–4.
22 Moishe Postone, Time, Labour and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical 
Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 167.
23 See Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 
1973), 335.
24 As Georg Lukács put it, “existence can have no reality except [. . .] the reality of lived experi-
ence.” Georg Lukács, Soul and Form, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973), 179.
15
notes on wealth as a real abstraction and the critique of suffering
requires analyses of the “struggle for life as it manifests itself historically in var-
ious specific forms of society.”25
Critically understood historical materialism is critique of capitalist society un-
derstood dogmatically as a historically overdetermined form of natural econom-
ic necessities and requirements. What appears in the appearance of society as 
a relationship between economic things is not some abstractly conceived eco-
nomic nature. Rather, what appears in capitalist society as economic nature is 
Man in her historically specific social relations. The capitalist economic laws 
compel the social individuals as if they, the economic laws, were a person apart, 
and yet, their nature is a social nature. What compels them is their own social 
world. In the words of Marx, “it is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis 
the earthly kernel of the misty creations of religion than to do the opposite, i.e., 
to develop from the actual, given relations of life the forms in which these have 
been apotheosized. The latter method” he continuous, “is the only materialist 
one, and therefore the only scientific one.” For him, the former method belongs 
to the “abstract materialism of the natural sciences, which excludes the historical 
process.”26 There is only one reality and that is the reality of historically definite 
forms of life.
Marx’s point about the actual relations of life is key to social form analysis. It 
asks about the social constitution of the economic categories and expounds 
their “nature” as a social nature. For social form analysis, therefore, the forces 
of production and the normative categories are the forces and norms of the ac-
tual capitalist social relations. In the words of Moishe Postone, “Marx’s critique 
transforms the categories of political economy from transhistorical categories of 
the constitution of wealth into critical categories of the specificity of the forms of 
wealth and social relations in capitalism.”27 Form analysis is critique of the eco-
nomic categories as apotheosised forms of definite social relations. It conceives 
of historical materialism as critique of the existing social relations, including 
their normative values and forms of thought.
25 Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, June 27, 1870, in Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Collected 
Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975–2004), 43:527.
26 Marx, Capital, Volume One, 494n4.
27 Postone, Time, Labour and Social Domination, 56.
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The social form approach to the critique of political economy emerged from the 
new left of 1968. It contains three overlapping methodological approaches. They 
are immanent critique, systematic dialectics, and ad hominem critique of the 
economic categories, which is decipherment of the economic abstractions as 
the apotheosised forms of definite social relations.
Immanent critique judges reality by the standard of its own claims. For example, 
it judges the reality of social equality by the standard of its normative claim to 
equality. By judging reality by its own criteria, it seeks to make the “petrified rela-
tions [. . .] dance by singing their own tune to them.”28 Instead of criticising real-
ity as failing to live up to its normative standards, it both demystifies the norma-
tive ideas of, say, freedom and equality as the pleasant norms of a dreadful con-
tents, and retains a glimpse of what could be. Matthias Benzer makes this point 
about the double meaning of immanent critique well when he says with regards 
to Adorno’s critical theory, the “liberal category of freedom purports to yield the 
utopian image of a genuinely free individual” but “on closer inspection, it si-
multaneously depicts an individual released from feudal social structures who is 
granted the autonomy that the capitalist economy requires of ‘him’; a ‘mockery 
of true freedom [. . .] which compels the individual towards ruggedness.’ ” At the 
same time, it critiques “society for failing to fulfil conceptual standards” which it 
“cannot avoid advocating” and which therefore lead to demands for “their social 
realization.”29 Immanent critique interrogates the social coldness of the norma-
tive standard. There is a crack in everything. That is how the light gets in.
Systematic dialectics is associated with the work of Chris Arthur in the UK 
and the so-called New Reading of Marx of Hans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut 
Reichelt in the former Federal Republic of Germany.30 Systematic dialectics fo-
cuses on the categorical character of the capitalist political economy to under-
28 Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction,” trans. 
Martin Milligan and Barbara Ruhemann, in Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 182.
29 Benzer, “Social Critique,” 583–84.
30 See Chris Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital (Leiden: Brill, 2004); Chris Arthur, 
The Spectre of Capital: Idea and Reality (Leiden: Brill, 2022); Hans-Georg Backhaus, 
Dialektik der Wertform: Untersuchungen zur marxschen Ökonomiekritik (Freiburg: Ça Ira, 
1997); Helmut Reichelt, Zur logischen Struktur des Kapitalbegriffs bei Karl Marx (Freiburg: 
Ça Ira, 2001); Helmut Reichelt, Neue Marx-Lektüre: Zur Kritik sozialwissenschaftlicher 
Logik (Freiburg: Ça Ira, 2013).
17
notes on wealth as a real abstraction and the critique of suffering
stand the logic that holds sway in it. It recognises the social forms as real (eco-
nomic) abstractions and argues that they establish the social framework within 
which, as Reichelt put it, the individuals encounter each other, “make contracts 
in the sphere of circulation, where they deal in mysterious economic forms with 
so-called ‘goods,’ and who have always already perceived each other as equal 
and free subjects of law, and, who, prior to this thinly veiled perception of them-
selves as independent subjects, experienced class society as one of inequality, 
exploitation and rule by an autonomised system.”31 Systematic dialectics elab-
orates the logic that holds sway in society as a process of real abstraction and 
expounds the categorical character of the relations of economic compulsion be-
yond the objective illusions of normative order thinking and the dogmatic mate-
rialism of a political left that deems itself capable of transforming the capitalist 
labour economy for the benefit of its surplus value producers.
Charlotte Baumann’s characterisation of systematic dialectics, the new Reading 
of Marx in particular, as a logicians’ account of the capitalist social relations is 
apposite.32 Although systematic dialectics delivers on the logic of the capitalist 
social nature, its concept of the social is tenuous. Systematic dialectics tends to 
take the identification of the logic of real abstraction as a goal, which entails the 
risk of falling back onto the (traditional) differentiation of society into system 
and lifeworld. Rather than conceptualising the capital relations with reference 
to the historical elements implicit in them, systematic dialectic posits capital as 
a conceptual totality akin to a Hegelian idea imposed on reality. For systemat-
ic dialectics the category of the free labourer is unsettling, to say the least. For 
Arthur “labour-power is not produced by capital; it is an external condition of 
capitalist production.”33 In contrast Elena Louisa Lange argues that “labor power 
is [. . .] a capitalistically produced commodity.” She argues that capital produces 
the commodity “labour power [sic]” as “the direct source” of its “raison d’etre: 
31 Helmut Reichelt, “Social Reality as Appearance: Some Notes on Marx’s Conception of 
Reality,” trans. Werner Bonefeld, in Human Dignity: Social Autonomy and the Critique of 
Capitalism, ed. Werner Bonefeld and Kosmas Psychopedis (London: Routledge, 2017), 65.
32 Charlotte Baumann, “Adorno, the New Reading of Marx, and Methodologies of Critique,” 
in Adorno and Marx: Negative Dialectics and the Critique of Political Economy, ed. Werner 
Bonefeld and Chris O’Kane (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 55–76.
33 Chris Arthur, “The Inner Totality of Capitalism,” Historical Materialism 14, no. 3 (January 
2006): 92, https://doi.org/10.1163/156920606778531752.
18
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profit.”34 Her identification of the capital relation as a system that produces its 
own social premise conceives of the social relations in terms of their incorporat-
ed functionality. Postone’s account expresses the dualist conception of society as 
system and as lifeworld. He argues that capital “subjects people to impersonal, 
increasingly rationalized structural imperatives and constraints,” which “cannot 
be grasped adequately in terms of class domination.”35 In his account, “capital” 
as system sets the objective framework within which the social conflicts unfold.
The identification of capital as an extra-social subject presumes what needs to 
be explained. On one hand, following Adorno, “the reality in which men live is 
not unvarying and independent of them.” On the other, following Clarke, the cap-
italist relations of production presuppose the historical emergence of a class of 
free labourers.36 It is the case that a logic holds sway in capitalist political econ-
omy. It incorporates the individuals as its personifications. However, its shape 
remains human. That is to say, the individuals “live in social being, not in [eco-
nomic] nature,” and their social being has not been given to them by the capital-
ist economic nature.37 It is rather the historical result of their own—objectively 
compelled—social practices.
Discovering the untruth of the capitalist relations does not only entail discovery 
of the logic that holds sway in reified society. It also entails discovery of the sim-
ple fact that the capitalist “social order cannot exist without distorting men.”38 
The social individuals are not just cogs in a system of economic compulsion. As 
such cogs, mere human “instruments of production,” they are “possessed with 
consciousness.”39 As Baumann puts it, they suffer “from the pressures” of their 
34 Elena Louisa Lange, Value without Fetish: Uno Kōzō’s Theory of “Pure Capitalism” in Light 
of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 47.
35 Moishe Postone, “The Subject and Social Theory: Marx and Lukács on Hegel,” in History 
and Heteronomy: Critical Essays, ed. Koichi Maeda (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Center for 
Philosophy, 2009), 78.
36 Theodor W. Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique, trans. Willis Domingo (Cam-
bridge: Polity, 2013), 28; Clarke, Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology, 118. See also Si-
mon Clarke, “Class Struggle and the Working Class: The Problem of Commodity Fetishism,” 
in The Labour Debate: An Investigation into the Theory and Reality of Capitalist Work, ed. 
Ana C. Dinerstein and Michael Neary, eds. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 50–69.
37 Adorno, Against Epistemology, 28.
38 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 194.
39 Marx, Capital, Volume One, 719.
19
notes on wealth as a real abstraction and the critique of suffering
own reified existence as personifications of the economic categories.40 Society 
as a process of real abstraction does not suffer from the capitalist economic na-
ture. It does not go on strike and does not struggle to make ends meet. The social 
individuals do, and they do so as personifications of their own social world that 
in the form of the economic object compels them into action.
On the one hand, the understanding of the mysterious character of the economic 
things, which “abound with metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties,” 
rests on the comprehension of the human social practice that furnishes them 
with a will and a dynamic. The social individuals “do this without being aware 
of it” in the pursuit of their self-preservation.41 On the other, although society’s 
laws of motion abstract “from its individual subjects, degrading them to mere ex-
ecutors, mere partners in social wealth and social struggle, there would be noth-
ing without individuals and their spontaneities.”42 Reification, society as system, 
“finds its limitation in reified Man.”43 That is, the critique of reification amounts 
to the conceptualised praxis of the capitalist social relations. The preponderance 
of society as reified object entails the sheer unrest of life as its hidden, non-con-
ceptual foundation and secret history. The need to make suffering speak, to “lend 
a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth.”44 In this context, suffering is not an 
existential term of pure subjective feeling, the mush of the soul. Rather, it is an 
objectively mediated term. It “is the weight of objectivity upon the subject, and 
because that which the subject experiences as its most subjective moment—the 
expression of suffering—is objectively mediated.”45 While a definite logic holds 
sway in the social forms, the critique of political economy is decipherment of the 
social relations that constitute them. It is decipherment of the relations of eco-
nomic compulsion as relations of the sheer unrest of life.
Concluding Remarks
Social form analysis interrogates the economic categories as the objectified 
forms of definite social relations. Furthermore, it argues that the sheer unrest of 
40 Baumann, “Adorno,” 66.
41 Marx, Capital, Volume One, 163, 166–67.
42 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 304.
43 Theodor W. Adorno, Gesellschaftstheorie und Kulturkritik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975), 25.
44 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 17–18.
45 Adorno, 18; translation modified.
20
werner bonefeld
life, the class struggle to avoid and alleviate suffering, is the hidden secret of the 
relations of economic objectivity.
The social mentality and the forms of thought of the acting individuals are in-
corporated in the spirit of money. However, money does not talk. It is rather the 
social individuals who speak in and through money as the independent power 
of their social relations. Money does not care about inflation or deflation, wheth-
er it belongs to the few or is desired by the many, or whether it yields living off-
spring or crashes. The validity of money is a social validity, and its power to 
compel the individuals to the point of madness is socially constituted. As the 
universal of the capitalist relations of economic compulsion, it “compress[es] 
the particular until it splinters, like a torture instrument.”46 Yet, money does not 
care for the sacrifice of living labour on the altar of profit. The capitalist cares 
for profit – as he must – to avoid competitive erosion. The free labourers care for 
money, too. They struggle for money to make a living. In its entirety, the world 
of economic compulsion is a world of definite forms of human social practice, 
which endow society in the form of the “money subject” with a cold, calculating 
consciousness.47 The defining character of bourgeois society is social coldness.
The critique of social coldness has to be more than just a normative argument 
about re-distributive justice, equality and freedom. Theoretical concepts and 
normative values “cannot be perceived without reference to the historical ele-
ments implicit in it.”48 The history-making violence which divorced the direct 
producers from the means of subsistence imbues the bourgeois concepts of free-
dom and equality with a definite social content that appears in its civilised form 
as an exchange relationship between supposedly equal legal subjects—one 
trading her labour-power for a wage to “dodge the freedom to starve,” the other 
consuming the acquired labour-power for profit to avoid competitive erosion.49 
46 Adorno, 346.
47 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Policital Economy, trans. Martin 
Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1973), 144.
48 Theodor Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, ed. Christoph Gödde, trans. Edmund F. N. 
Jephcott (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 145.
49 Adorno, History and Freedom, 201. On law making violence and law preserving vio-
lence, see Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, 
Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund F. N. Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: 
Schocken, 1986), 277–300; Amy Swiffen, “Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Law,” in The SAGE 
21
notes on wealth as a real abstraction and the critique of suffering
The concepts of justice, humanity, freedom, and equality do not comprise a nor-
mative standard that remains somehow separated from an altogether disagree-
able social content. Rather, they are afflicted with the injustice and inhumanity 
“under whose spell they were conceived.”50 The truth of normative critique is 
the untruth of freedom as economic compulsion. It really is the case that the dy-
namic of the whole process of capital as self-valorising value is fed by the social 
practices of the class divided individuals who “owe their life to what is being 
done to them.”51 Clearly, the civilised regulation of social coldness is much pref-
erable to its authoritarian conduct. Yet, by standing up for the free labourers the 
normative critique of capitalism endorses the system that compels them in their 
acquired freedom.
“Thinking means venturing beyond.”52 We know the bad; we should know how 
to avoid it, but we do not know the good. What a human freedom it would be to 
live life without anxiety and worry about the satisfaction of needs, and with time 
to spare for enjoyment. In the meantime, despite an immense accumulation of 
wealth, the poor and miserable continue to “chew words to fill their bellies.”53
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