The Illusion of the Economic: SocialTheory

without Social Forms

Patrick Murray, Creighton University

A theory of social forms is of central importance to a critical theory.

—Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination1

I suggest that capitalism should first and foremost be understood as a historically specific form of
social life, at the heart of which is a historically unique abstract form of domination that finds
expression in a global historical dynamic.
—Moishe Postone, “The Current Crisis and the Anachronism of Value”2

Lacking a conception of the specific character of labor in capitalism, Critical Theory ascribed its
consequences to labor per se. The frequently described shift of Critical Theory from the analysis
of political economy to a critique of instrumental reason does not, then, signify that the theorists
of the Frankfurt School simply abandoned the former in favor of the latter. Rather, that shift
followed from, and was based upon, a particular analysis of political economy, more specifically,
a traditional understanding of Marx’s critique of political economy.
—Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination3

I
remember walking with Moishe decades ago in Frankfurt, in a conversation that
ratcheted up from the commodity fetish to the capital fetish. That conversation
stuck with me. Years later, I wrote an essay on the capital fetish as manifested
in the trinity formula.4 In writing it, the phrase “the illusion of the economic” came
to me. The shared horizon of discourse that Moishe alludes to in explaining the ease

I would like to thank Christine Achinger and the organizers of “Capitalism and Social Theory: A Confer-
ence for Moishe Postone,” Bill Sewell and Johnathan Levy, for giving me the opportunity to honor Moishe
and his work. I am greatly indebted to Moishe and Jeanne Schuler.
1. Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 179.
2. Moishe Postone, “The Current Crisis and the Anachronism of Value,” Continental Thought and Theory
1, no. 4 (2017): 39.
3. Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 119.
4. Patrick Murray, “The Illusion of the Economic: The Trinity Formula and the ‘Religion of Everyday
Life,’” in The Mismeasure of Wealth: Essays on Marx and Social Form (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 398–422.

Critical Historical Studies (Spring 2020). © 2020 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
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20 | CRIT ICAL H IST ORIC AL ST UDI ES SPRI NG 2020

with which members of the Frankfurt School shifted from critical political economy
to the critique of instrumental action creates the illusion of the economic. Both
economics and the theory of instrumental action posit an economy-in-general, that
is, a provisioning process without any constitutive social forms—an impossible ge-
neric economy. Both want to do social theory without social forms.
I offer an interpretation—perhaps it is more of a restatement—of Moishe’s cri-
tique of traditional Marxism. As a variety of critical political economy, as opposed to
Marx’s critique of political economy, traditional Marxism is caught in the illusion of
the economic, the illusion that there is an economy-in-general, where wealth, la-
bor, and production all exist in general, unencumbered by any constitutive social
forms or purposes. To operate within the horizon of discourse fixed by the illusion
of the economic is to attempt to do social theory without social forms.

TH R E E QU E S TI O N S A B O UT W E AL TH
Marx begins Capital by answering a question that is rarely asked: What is the social
form and purpose of wealth? Two questions about wealth are familiar and commonly
asked: How much wealth is there? and How is wealth distributed? But this third question—
What is the social form and purpose of wealth?—is overlooked.5 Asking it usually
causes perplexity, as in: What are you talking about?
Overlooking the third question results in the illusion of the economic, which
makes the economy-in-general the object of inquiry, resulting in the fruitless at-
tempt to do social theory without social forms. The heart of Marx’s critique of polit-
ical economy is this: political economy fails to engage self-consciously with consti-
tutive social forms and purposes. It omits them altogether or conflates them with
generally applicable categories. Marx attributes David Ricardo’s “inability to grasp
the specific form of bourgeois production” to his “obsession that bourgeois produc-
tion is production as such.”6 “Bourgeois or capitalist production . . . is consequently
for [Ricardo],” Marx writes, “not a specific definite mode of production, but simply
the mode of production.”7 Perhaps Marx’s most basic aim in Capital is to demonstrate
that capitalism is a socially and historically specific mode of production and as such
subject to change.
5. Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi pose the third question about wealth and labor: “Above and beyond
the matter of how wealth is ‘distributed,’ there is the problem of what counts as wealth in the first place and
how that wealth is produced. Similarly, behind the matter of who gets how much for what sort of labor lies
the deeper question of what counts as labor, how it is organized and what its organization is now demand-
ing from, and doing to, people.” Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi, Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory,
ed. Brian Milstein (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 3.
6. Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, part II, ed. S. W. Ryazanskaya, trans. Renate Simpson (London:
Lawrence & Wishart, 1968), 529.
7. Ibid., n. 504.

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 Illusion of the Economic | 21

Ricardo’s blunder is twofold: (1) capitalist production is not “production as such”

and (2) there is no “production as such.” Likewise, when, as Moishe points out, Jon
Elster “conflates value and wealth,” Elster makes two mistakes: (1) value is not
wealth and (2) there is no wealth-in-general.8 Wealth is a poor, though legitimate,
general category; it does not tell us much. By contrast, as Moishe puts it, “Value,
within the framework of Marx’s analysis, is a critical category that reveals the his-
torical specificity of the forms of wealth and production characteristic of capital-
ism.”9 For Marx, writes Moishe, “value is a social form that . . . is at the very heart
of capitalist society.”10 What is “at the very heart of capitalist society”? A social form,
value, which turns out to be “self-valorizing value,” that is, capital.
Marx’s preliminary answer to the third question is that, in capitalist societies,
wealth takes the social form of a commodity. Marx takes it as the first order of busi-
ness in Capital to examine this social form of wealth. In the same stroke, he begins to
answer correlative questions: What is the social form and purpose of labor, and,
more broadly, What is the social form and purpose of production in capitalist soci-
eties? Marx’s answers to these questions all have a double character; they involve
use-value considerations and definite social forms and purposes. The commodity
is a useful thing and a value; as such it has an exchange value, that is, a price. Like
other social forms of labor, the capitalist labor process aims at producing new useful
things; unlike other social forms, it is a valorization process. It produces wealth
in the commodity form to increase the value invested in the production process:
M must become M 1 DM. Labor in capitalism is use-value- and value-producing,
but not only value-producing; to fulfill its purpose, labor in capitalist society must
be surplus-value-producing labor. In chapter 7 of Capital, volume 1, Marx says
things about the labor process in general, but it is a mistake to conclude, as Jürgen
Habermas does, that because we can say things in general about the labor process
that there is a labor process-in-general. That kind of thinking belongs to the illusion
of the economic.

W H Y H A S M O IS H E ’S W O RK NO T HA D AN E VE N
GR EA TER I MPA CT ?
Why has Moishe’s reinterpretation of Marx’s critical theory not made an even
broader impact on how Marx is understood and on contemporary social theory?

8. Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 26 n. 30.

9. Ibid., 26. Chris Arthur writes, “The question of social form is central to the Marxian understanding
of economic systems. It is only in virtue of differences in social form that Marx can insist that there is no
such thing as ‘economics’ in general, but that each mode of production has its specific and peculiar laws of
motion.” Chris Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 86.
10. Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 25.

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22 | CRIT ICAL H IST ORI CAL ST UDIES SPRI NG 2020

Why does so much literature on Marx and on the capitalist mode of production still
not get to first base? Alfredo Saad-Filho observes, “According to the ‘traditional’ in-
terpretation, Marx’s theory of value is not essentially different from Ricardo’s.”11
What keeps the “traditional” interpretation from recognizing that Marx’s theory
of value is about the social form of labor in capitalism? Why ignore Marx’s claim
“The exact development of the concept of capital [is] necessary, since . . . capital it-
self . . . [is] the foundation of bourgeois society”?12 For example, Thomas Piketty,
the brilliant economist and author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, lacks the
Marxian concept of capital as a social form, despite the title of his celebrated book,
which can give the impression that he is picking up where Marx left off.13 He is
not.
Moishe argues that “Marx redetermines the object of investigation. The center of
his concern becomes the forms of wealth, labor, and production in capitalism.”14
Grasping Moishe’s stress on social form is, for many social theorists, like picking
up mercury with your fingers. Social form is elusive. Putting the focus on social form
changes the horizon of discourse; it “redetermines the object of investigation.”15
Horizons of discourse are hard to recognize and yet more difficult to shift. So much
of social theory is trapped in the illusion of the economic that it is hard to notice it.
The illusion of the economic arises within what Marx calls the “bourgeois hori-
zon,” which trades in phenomenologically false bifurcations such as the purely sub-
jective versus the purely objective, form versus content, forces versus relations of
production, the labor process versus the valorization process, distribution versus
production, and more.16 A bifurcation treats contrasted terms as separable, as op-
posed to an analytical distinction—what David Hume calls “a distinction of rea-
son”—which treats contrasted terms as distinguishable but not separable. What I refer
to as phenomenology is experience-based inquiry that determines when a contrast
concerns what is separable, such as my shoes are from my feet, and when what is
distinguishable is not separable, such as the blue from my shirt. The lesson that
Marx learned at age 19, when he gulped down Hegel, was that form and matter
are distinguishable, not separable: “The mistake lay in my believing that the one
[form or matter] could and must be developed in separation from the other [matter

11. Alfredo Saad-Filho, The Value of Marx (London: Routledge, 2002), 21.
12. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 331.
13. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).
14. Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 57.
15. Ibid.
16. Marx charges Proudhon with being caught in the bourgeois horizon. See Karl Marx, “Letter to P. V.
Annenkov,” in The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 190.

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 Illusion of the Economic | 23

or form], and consequently I obtained no actual form, but only a desk with drawers
in which I then strew sand.”17 Already as a teenager, Marx rejected the bourgeois
horizon that leads social theory to dispense with social forms.
The heart of Marx’s historical materialism is the phenomenological claim that
human life requires a reproducible provisioning process and that that process al-
ways has a constitutive social form and purpose. As he and Engels put it in The Ger-
man Ideology, a mode of production is always a way of life: “This mode of production
[Produktionsweise] must not be considered simply as being the reproduction of the
physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these
individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life [Lebensweise]
on their part.”18 For the most part, social theory has not taken up this insight.

C AU GH T IN TH E I LL U SI O N O F TH E E C O NO M I C: T HR E E
AL T ER N AT I VE S TO M A R X’ S TH E O RY O F VA L UE
Tony Smith, in a brief appendix to The Logic of Marx’s “Capital,” considers three al-
ternatives to Marxian value theory: “I shall briefly and provisionally examine three
of the most significant theoretical alternatives to Marxian value theory: neoclas-
sical economics, Weberian social theory, and Neo-Ricardian (Sraffian) economics.”19
I agree with Smith’s conclusion that none of these three can compete with the ex-
planatory power of Marx’s value theory. But I argue for a more critical position than
either Tony Smith or Moishe take: utility, instrumental action, and the economic are
all pseudoconcepts because each is caught in the illusion of the economic. Each pos-
its a social world without constitutive social forms and purposes.20 Because there is
no such world, these concepts have no object. They are shadows of the value forms,
which constitute capitalist society.21 Social theory suffers from taking shadows for
reality.

17. Karl Marx, “Letter to His Father: On a Turning-Point in Life,” in Writings of the Young Marx on Phi-
losophy and Society, ed. and trans. L. Easton and K. Guddat (New York: Anchor, 1967), 43.
18. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, in vol. 5, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels Collected
Works, trans. Clemens Dutt (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 31.
19. Tony Smith, The Logic of Marx’s Capital (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 196.
20. Moishe does not take any of these three concepts to be pseudoconcepts. Utility is not a topic in Time,
Labor, and Social Domination; there is no index entry for it. Moishe is critical of traditional Marxism’s reduc-
tion of Marx’s critique of political economy to “purely economic categories”: “Very frequently, however,
the categories of Marx’s critique have been taken to be purely economic categories” (Time, Labor, and Social
Domination, 18). But he does not argue that there are no “purely economic categories” and that, conse-
quently, the “purely economic” is a pseudoconcept. Moishe’s thinking about instrumental action is dis-
cussed later in this article.
21. Marx and Engels identified utility as a shadow of the price form in The German Ideology: “The ap-
parent absurdity of merging all the manifold relationships of people in the one relation of utility
[Brauchbarkeit], this apparently metaphysical abstraction arises from the fact that in modern bourgeois

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24 | CR ITI CAL HIST ORICAL STU DIE S SPRING 2020

Martha Campbell makes two observations that I will link. Campbell writes,
“There are no counterparts to Marx’s economic concepts in either classical or utility
theory.”22 I take this to mean that Marx breaks with economics, where economics is
understood to be a generally applicable social science. Marx’s fundamental catego-
ries are, as Paul Mattick Jr., puts it, “explicitly social and historical ones,” whereas
those of economics are generally applicable ones.23 The second passage from Camp-
bell links Marx’s critique of political economy to how capitalism presents itself:
“What is, for Marx, the extraordinary feature of economic activity in capitalism”
is “that it claims to create wealth ‘pure and simple’ and [to be] organised by this pur-
pose.”24 Because of its peculiarly abstract forms of social mediation, the capitalist
mode of production engenders the illusion of the economic: it presents itself as hav-
ing no specific social form or purpose, hence as production-in-general. Economics
takes its cue from this illusion.25
Capital casts a spell on social theory. Capital presents itself such that its constitu-
tive social forms go unrecognized, thereby engendering the illusion of the economic.
Here is one way that capital pulls off its disappearing act. First, the circulation of cap-
ital, M–C–M’, is reduced to simple commodity circulation, C–M–C. Participants in
simple commodity circulation regard anything more complex than buying and

society all relations are subordinated in practice to the one abstract monetary-commercial relation.” Marx
and Engels, The German Ideology, 409.
22. Martha Campbell, “Marx’s Concept of Economic Relations and the Method of Capital,” in Marx’s
Method in “Capital”: A Reexamination, ed. Fred Moseley (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993),
152.
23. Paul Mattick Jr., “Marx’s Dialectic,” in Marx’s Method, 124.
24. Martha Campbell, “The Objectivity of Value versus the Idea of Habitual Action,” in The Constitution
of Capital: Essays on Volume I of Marx’s Capital, ed. Riccardo Bellofiore and Nicola Taylor (Basingstoke: Pal-
grave Macmillan, 2004), 86. Marx reminds us that to treat the capitalist mode of production as if it were
simply producing useful things is to engage in bad abstraction: “It must never be forgotten, that in capitalist
production what matters is not the immediate use-value but the exchange-value and, in particular, the ex-
pansion of surplus-value. This is the driving motive of capitalist production, and it is a pretty conception
that—in order to reason away the contradictions of capitalist production—abstracts from its very basis
and depicts it as a production aiming at the direct satisfaction of the consumption of the producers” (Marx,
Theories of Surplus-Value, 495).
25. In their college textbook, Microeconomics, R. Glenn Hubbard and Anthony Patrick O’Brien provide a
brief list of “important economic terms.” “Firm” (both for-profit and not-for-profit), “household,” and “en-
trepreneur” all make the list; so does “human capital,” defined as “the accumulated training and skills that
workers possess,” and four factors of production (also called economic resources), namely: labor, capital,
natural resources (including land), and entrepreneurship. All the terms on the list are intended to be gen-
erally applicable, hence socially and historically nonspecific. None of the following terms make the list of
“important economic terms”: the commodity, property, the juridical person, contracts, value, money, buyer,
seller, borrower, lender, wages, profit, rent, or interest. Hubbard and O’Brien are intent on doing social
theory without social forms. See R. Glenn Hubbard and Anthony Patrick O’Brien, Microeconomics, 5th ed.
(New York: Pearson, 2016).

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 Illusion of the Economic | 25

selling as “nothing but hocus-pocus.”26 Second, money is dismissed as a mere tool,

reducing commodity circulation to the exchange of useful things—wealth with no
social form. Paul Samuelson writes, “If we strip exchange down to its barest essen-
tials and peel off the obscuring layer of money, we find that trade between individ-
uals or nations largely boils down to barter—transforming one good into another by
exchange.”27 In two simple steps, all the value forms, the social forms that constitute
the capitalist mode of production, vanish.
It is one thing to say, as Marx does, that we can identify general features of the
production and distribution of wealth (the provisioning process), but it is a fallacy to
conclude that there is a provisioning process-in-general. Because their subject mat-
ter, the economy, is illusory, economists engage in bait and switch.28 Having baited
their readers with the promise of an impossible general science of human behavior,
they switch and introduce, deus ex machina, the categories familiar from capitalist so-
cieties: money, prices, wages, profit, rent, and interest.

I NS TR U M E NT AL AC T I ON I S A PS E U DO C O NC E P T, NO T TH E
C ON C E PT O F L AB O R I N C A PI T AL I SM
Moishe criticizes the Frankfurt School turn to the critique of instrumental action,
but the criticism can be directed at the very idea of instrumental action.29 Moishe
rejects identifying the general concept of social labor with instrumental action, ob-
serving, “Horkheimer, in effect, attributes a consequence of the specific character of
labor in capitalism to labor in general.”30 But Moishe identifies labor in capitalism
with instrumental action: “Social labor as such is not instrumental action; labor in

26. Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), 259.
27. Paul Samuelson, Economics, 9th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), 55.
28. See Samuel Chambers, There’s No Such Thing as “The Economy”: Essays on Capitalist Value (New York:
Punctum, 2018).
29. For a more extensive treatment of the ideas in this section, see Patrick Murray, “Critical Theory and
the Critique of Political Economy: From Critical Political Economy to the Critique of Political Economy,” in
The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, ed. Barbara Best, Werner Bonefeld, and Chris O’Kane,
3 vols. (Los Angeles: Sage, 2018), 764–82.
30. Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 181–82. Jürgen Habermas is unequivocal in identifying
the general concept of labor with instrumental action. That suits his misreading of chapter 7, “The Labor
Process and the Valorization Process,” of Capital, volume 1, in which he wrongly takes Marx’s description of
the labor process in general to be an account of an impossible economy-in-general. That posits “the econ-
omy” as existing with no constitutive social forms or purposes. Nancy Fraser makes this point in discussing
Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action: “Habermas relies on systems-theoretic ideas about functional
differentiation to such an extent that he in effect removes the economic sphere from the realm of criticism.
The economy is understood as something that functions autonomously, a ‘norm-free’ domain driven by its
own logic. This amounts to another kind of ‘black box’ approach, as all we can do is protect against the
invasion of the economic into other areas of life” (Fraser and Jaeggi, Capitalism, 4–5).

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26 | C RITI CAL HIST ORICAL ST UDI ES S PRIN G 2020

capitalism, however, is instrumental action.”31 I do not believe that labor in capital-

ism is instrumental action; moreover, I do not believe that there is any instrumental
action. As Christine Korsgaard states, “The instrumental principle tells us only that
we must take the means to our ends; it says nothing whatever about what our ends
should be.”32 But labor in capitalism has a definite end, namely the production and
accumulation of surplus value. The fact that labor in capitalism is “instrumental” to
that end does not make it instrumental action.
It may seem that if instrumental action is not labor as such, as Moishe rightly ar-
gues, then it must be labor in capitalism. But that reasoning relies on a false di-
lemma, for instrumental action is neither a general concept of labor nor a specific so-
cial kind of labor. Instrumental action is no form of social labor, and, because there is
nothing for it to refer to, the notion of instrumental action is a pseudoconcept. Labor
in capitalism is not instrumental action. Labor in capitalism is surplus-value-
producing labor. Labor in capitalism is a social form of labor that has a definite—
not an arbitrary—purpose, one that is laden with moral, social, legal, and political
significance.

C ON C L U S IO N : SO C I A L TH E O RY N E E D S GO O D
FU N DA M E NT AL C O NC E PT S
Social theory needs good fundamental concepts. With his critique of political econ-
omy, Marx pioneered key concepts needed to understand the modern world, the
concepts of social forms constitutive of the capitalist mode of production: the com-
modity, money, value, wage labor, surplus value, profit, interest, rent, and (above
all) capital. Moishe got that. Unfortunately, Marx’s categories have been overlooked,
neglected, misinterpreted, or dismissed. Pseudoconcepts that are shadows of capital
have usurped them: the economic, utility, and instrumental action. With its focus on
social form, Moishe’s renewal of Marx’s critique of political economy offers a way
out of the illusion of the economic.

FI N AL R E MA R K: TA K IN G T H E N E W R E AD IN G O F M A RX A S A
B RA N CH O F F R AN KF U RT S CH O O L C R I TI C AL TH E O R Y
Moishe wrote of the “shift of Critical Theory from the analysis of political economy
to a critique of instrumental reason,”33 implicitly placing his own renewal of the
Marxian critique of political economy in Time, Labor, and Social Domination outside

31. Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 180.

32. Christine Korsgaard, “The Myth of Egoism,” The Lindley Lecture, University of Kansas, October 21,
1999 (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 2000), 3.
33. Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 119.

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 Illusion of the Economic | 27

the tradition of Frankfurt School Critical Theory. In their conversation about capi-
talism, Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi adopt that point of view, wondering, “What
happened to marginalize capitalism for so long? How might we understand its
disappearance from critical theory?” Because their notion of the economy as a
“black box” refers to what I call the illusion of the economic, their answer, “it seems
that, over the last several decades, we have seen a turn toward a ‘black box’ view of
the economy,” and mine have much in common.34 However, let me urge that
Moishe’s critiques of Friedrich Pollock, Max Horkheimer, and Jürgen Habermas
be taken not as breaking with the Frankfurt School but as belonging to a less heralded
line of its development that runs through Theodor Adorno and several of his stu-
dents, including Alfred Schmidt, Hans-Georg Backhaus, Helmut Reichelt, Hans-
Jürgen Krahl, Jürgen Ritsert, and Helmut Reinicke—to Moishe Postone.35

34. Fraser and Jaeggi, Capitalism, 4.

35. The authors of the introduction to Marxism and the Critique of Value, Neil Larsen, Mathias Nilges,
Josh Robinson, and Nicholas Brown, locate Moishe’s work in this way (Neil Larsen, Mathias Nilges, Josh
Robinson, and Nicholas Brown, eds., Marxism and the Critique of Value [Chicago: MCM0 , 2014], xlviii–xlix,
n. 8). They call attention to “the origins of the neue Marx-Lektüre in Adorno’s classroom in the 1960s” (xiii)
and note that “both Helmut Reichelt and Hans-Georg Backhaus studied under Adorno in Frankfurt” (xlix,
n. 9). They refer to Backhaus’s “transcript of Adorno’s seminar of summer 1962 on Marx and the fundamen-
tal concepts of sociological theory, which appeared as an appendix to Backhaus’s Dialektik der Wertform:
Untersuchung zur Marxschen Ökonomiekritik (Freiburg: Çaira, 1997), 501–13” (Marxism and the Critique of Value,
xlix, n. 9). An English translation of that transcript has appeared as “Theodor W. Adorno on ‘Marx and the
Basic Concepts of Sociology,’” trans. Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson and Chris O’Kane, in Historical Materialism
26, no. 1 (2018): 154–64, with an introductory essay by Chris O’Kane, “Introduction to ‘Theodor W. Adorno
on Marx and the Basic Concepts of Sociological Theory. From a Seminar Transcript in the Summer Semester
of 1962,’” in Historical Materialism 26, no. 1 (2018): 137–53. Gillian Rose’s The Melancholy Science: An Introduction
to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978); Dirk Braunstein’s Adorno’s
Kritik der politische Ökonomie (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011); Christian Lotz’s The Capitalist Schema: Time, Money,
and the Culture of Abstraction (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014); and Werner Bonefeld’s Critical Theory
and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason (London: Bloomsbury, 2014) all advance
the idea that the Marxian critique of political economy is central to Adorno’s critical theory.

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