Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy

One of the key figures developing the Open Marxism school, Werner Bonefeld, wrote a sort of introductory level textbook "Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy - On Subversion and Negative Reason" (2014). The book generally builds on and critiques Marxist thought. It might be useful for an introduction, but a decade later this book has not picked up much traction. A few notes:

"For the critique of political economy, economic nature is not the essence of economics. The essence of economics is society, and society is the social individual in her social relations. The circumstance that Man in her social relations appears as a personification of economic things – a bearer of economic laws – focuses the critique of political economy as a negative theory of society. In capitalism, Marx argues, the individuals are governed by the product of their own hands and what appears thus as economic nature is in fact a socially constituted nature that belongs to definite social relations. Social reality is thus an 'objective appearance': the social individual vanishes in her own social world only to reappear with a price tag, by which she is governed.35 Yet this inversion of the social subject into the economic object is her own work. It does not derive from some abstract economic matter that objectifies itself in the acting subject, as if by force of nature. For 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'." (p. 27)

"Every so-called trickle-down effect that capitalist accumulation might bring forth presupposes a prior and sustained trickle up in the capitalist accumulation of wealth. And then society 'suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence'." (p. 225)