Capital and Language From the New Economy to the War Economy

by Marazzi, Christian; Hardt, Michael

• ISBN13: 9781584350675
• ISBN10: 1584350679
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-09-12
• Publisher: Semiotext(e)

Summary

The Swiss-Italian economist Christian Marazzi is one of the core theorists of the Italian postfordist movement, along with Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, and Bifo (Franco Berardi). But although his work is often cited by scholars (particularly by those in the field of "Cognitive Capitalism"), his writing has never appeared in English. This translation of his most recent work, Capital and Language(published in Italian in 2002), finally makes Marazzi's work available to an English-speaking audience. Capital and Languagetakes as its starting point the fact that the extreme volatility of financial markets is generally attributed to the discrepancy between the "real economy" (that of material goods produced and sold) and the more speculative monetary-financial economy. But this distinction has long ceased to apply in the postfordist New Economy, in which both spheres are structurally affected by language and communication. In Capital and LanguageMarazzi argues that the changes in financial markets and the transformation of labor into immaterial labor (that is, its reliance on abstract knowledge, general intellect, and social cooperation) are just two sides of the same coin. Capital and Languagefocuses on the causes behind the international economic and financial depression of 2001, and on the primary instrument that the U.S. government has since been using to face them: war. Marazzi points to capitalism's fourth stage (after mercantilism, industrialism, and the postfordist culmination of the New Economy): the "War Economy" that is already upon us. Marazzi offers a radical new understanding of the current international economic stage and crucial post-Marxist guidance for confronting capitalism in its newest form. Capital and Language also provides a warning call to a Left still nostalgic for a Fordist construct-a time before factory turned into office (and office into home), and before labor became linguistic.

Author Biography

Christian Marazzi was born in Lugano, Switzerland, in 1951. He obtained a degree in Political Science at the University of Padova, a master's degree at the London School of Economics and a doctoral degree in Economics at the City University of London. He has taught at the University of Padova, the State University of New York, and at the University of Lausanne. He is currently Director of Socio-Economic Research at the Scuola Universitaria della Svizzera Italiana.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Language at Work	p. 7
From Post-Fordism to the New Economy	p. 13
The New Business Cycle	p. 69
The Return of Surplus Value	p. 101
War and the Business Cycle	p. 145
Bibliography	p. 159
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