Money and its Power.

The session examines the money form of capitalist wealth. It argues that the satisfaction of needs is secondary to the requirement of making money out of money. In this context, it explores capital as a process of making money out of money, argues that in capitalism time is money, and examines the corporeality of its power. In capitalism money rules – what cannot be exchanged for money is worthless. Why, how, and with what consequence?

Wednesday, 4 June 2025 at 4:00 PM:

Economic Compulsion and the Critique of Suffering.

Marxʼs overriding concern in his critique of political economy is the conceptualization of the capitalist social relations. He asks, »What is necessary and unavoidable in a given production system?« For Adorno, capitalism is most perceptible where it hurts. He turns towards human suffering as the key to comprehending capitalism’s social reality. My concern is not whether Adorno’s turn towards human suffering is core to his negative dialectics and whether Marx is a logician of the capitalist social nature. My concern is rather in reading what Marx calls his ‘critique of the entire system of economic categories’ through Adorno’s determinate negation. The term economic compulsion’ lends itself to this reading.

Both lectures will be held in English in the Gosposka Hall ZRC SAZU, Gosposka ulica 16, Ljubljana.

Werner Bonefeld is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Politics at the University of York, UK, and Adjunct Professor at the Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU (Ljubljana, Slovenia). He teaches Contemporary Critical Theory in Western Marxian Thought at the University of Peking. Recent book publications include Adorno and Marx, which he co-edited with Chris O’Kane, and A Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion (Routledge, 2023). With Chris O’Kane, he is co-editor of Bloomsbury’s Critical Theory and the Critique of Society series.

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