In Letters Of Blood And Fire: Work, Machines, and Value in the Bad Infinity of Capitalism

Description

A captivating collection of essays documenting a return to the heated conflicts present at the advent of capitalism. IT, immaterial production, financialisation and globalisation have been trumpeted as inaugurating a new phase of capitalism that puts it beyond its violent origins. However, instead of being in a period of major social and economic novelty, the course of the last decades has seen a return to the fire and blood of struggles at the advent of capitalism. Emphasizing class struggles, Caffentzis explores how a wide range of conflicts and antagonisms.

George Caffentzis is a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern Maine and a founding member of the Midnight Notes Collective. He is the author of Clipped Coins, Abused Words, and Civil Government: John Locke's Philosophy of Money and the coeditor of A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities. He lives in New York City.

"George Caffentzis has been the philosopher of the anticapitalist movement from the American civil rights movement of the 1960s to the European autonomists of the 1970s, from the Nigerian workers of the oil boom of the 1980s to the encuentros of the Zapatistas in the 1990s, from the feminists of wages-for-housework to the struggle of the precariat for the commons. A historian of our own times, he carries the political wisdom of the twentieth century into the twenty-first. Here is capitalist critique and proletarian reasoning fit for our time." --Peter Linebaugh, author of The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All "George Caffentzis's essays in this timely collection offer a sharply uncompromising analysis of the transmutations of capital over the last three decades and a rereading of the classic texts in light of our own times. They teach us the constant alertness that we must embrace at the frontline of value struggle." --Massimo De Angelis, author of The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital "These essays reveal not only the blood and fire of twenty-first-century primitive accumulation but also the inescapable linkage of this savage and ongoing process to new forms of futuristic dispossession inscribed with robot ichor, silicon chips, and genomic code. George Caffentzis has for decades been creating a contemporary Marxism that is profoundly theorized, deeply historical, utterly original, compulsively readable, and always connected to the fighting fronts of an ever-changing class struggle. Today his writings are integral to, and indispensable for an understanding of, the uprisings of a global proletariat that has again exploded across the planet." --Nick Dyer-Witheford, author of Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism