The Spell of Capital

The Timeliness of Western Marxism reconstructs the tradition, impact, and contemporary relevance of two key concepts of critical cultural analysis. It thus emphasizes the continuity of a specific tradition of Western Marxism, in which the concepts of 'reification' and 'spectacle' were originally coined: the Lukács-Debord axis. The contemporary relevance of these two thinkers is at once highly dubious and more than obvious: in analytical or descriptive terms the concepts of 'reification' and 'spectacle' are often invoked - more often than not without any direct reference to their original theoretical context. The Lukács-Debord axis represents a whole tradition of Marxist cultural critique. In light of the analyses of this book, the theoretical insights and conceptual contributions of Lukács and Debord are not only inseparable from the key ambitions of so-called 'Western Marxism' but even define its very core. The aim of this book is to provide a fundamental understanding of the history of Western Marxism to revisit discussions of the importance of its methodology for a materialist phenomenology of contemporary society.