Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War by Christian Marazzi

By Christian Marazzi

The Swiss-Italian economist Christian Marazzi is without doubt one of the center theorists of the Italian postfordist circulate, besides Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, and Bifo (Franco Berardi). yet even supposing his paintings is frequently mentioned through students (particularly by way of these within the box of "Cognitive Capitalism"), his writing hasn't ever seemed in English. This translation of his latest paintings, Capital and Language (published in Italian in 2002), eventually makes Marazzi's paintings to be had to an English-speaking audience.

Capital and Language takes as its place to begin the truth that the extraordinary volatility of monetary markets is mostly attributed to the discrepancy among the "real economy" (that of fabric items produced and bought) and the extra speculative monetary-financial economic climate. yet this contrast has lengthy ceased to use within the postfordist New economic climate, within which either spheres are structurally laid low with language and communique. In Capital and Language Marazzi argues that the adjustments in monetary markets and the transformation of work into immaterial hard work (that is, its reliance on summary wisdom, common mind, and social cooperation) are only facets of an identical coin.

Capital and Language specializes in the reasons at the back of the overseas fiscal and monetary melancholy of 2001, and at the basic software that the U.S. govt has for the reason that been utilizing to stand them: warfare. Marazzi issues to capitalism’s fourth level (after mercantilism, industrialism, and the postfordist end result of the hot Economy): the "War Economy" that's already upon us.

Marazzi bargains an intensive new knowing of the present foreign financial degree and the most important post-Marxist assistance for confronting capitalism in its most modern shape. Capital and Language additionally presents a serious warning call to a Left nonetheless nostalgic for a Fordist construct—a time ahead of manufacturing unit became place of work (and place of work into home), and earlier than hard work grew to become linguistic.

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Extra resources for Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy

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When you can no longer define a performance norm a priori," writes Pierre Veltz, "there remains j ust one possibility: assigning obj ectives to work units and j udging them a posteriori. When the analytical effort of elaborating detailed work procedures and transmitting them throughout highly hierarchical organizations becomes too costly, or useless, or impossible-or all three of these things-there remains the possibility of instituting a fabric of hierarchical rules into which will be inserted contractual relationships, to be updat­ ed from time to time, between the actors" (Veitz, 2000) .

It seems to me, however, that there is an important aspect of today's global­ ization that allows us to speak of unprecedented processes destined to last a long time. In particular, I'm thinking of the jinancializa­ tion of household economies, the diversion of an increasingly larger part of family savings to securities markets around the world in the hopeful search for increasing returns. This constitutes a break in the Fordist circuit of savings which placed national Treasury Notes at the center of families' deferred income (or complementary or supplemental income if we think of pension funds) .

We see this when one company acquires another with the help of its own shares, or even better when a manager accepts to be paid in stock options. For this reason, then, we can consider shares as constituting an embryonic form of currency even if they still can't be used to purchase consumer goods. The question of whether or not this form will arrive at maturity, whether it will become a currency in the full sense of the term, is in a certain sense the challenge of our analysis because such a turn of events would constitute a radical change in the principle of sovereignty.

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