In Letters Of Blood And Fire

George Caffentzis

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.

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 28 février 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781604862973
• Langue: English

Extrait

Praise for In Letters of Blood and Fire
"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. This teaching is so much more precious to us as we approach a renewed period of struggle capable of subverting the meaning of the current crisis and turning it into an opportunity for emancipation. An alertness that is essential, for our own safety and that of our communities, and that does not find comfort in false myths: capital’s beast remains a beast, and there is no technology or privileged type of labour that will deliver us a world of social justice and peace."
Massimo De Angelis, editor of The Commoner: A Web Journal of Other Values and author of The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital
"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. Trained as both an economist and a physicist he has taken fundamental categories such as money, time, work, energy, and value and rethought them in relation to both revolutionary Marxism and the dynamics of our changing movement. A historian of our own times, he carries the political wisdom of the twentieth century into the twenty-first. He is a lively and dogged polemicist; he dances circles around the pompous marxologist; with the passing of time his thought has grown in depth and increasingly tends to be expressed with pleasure and humor. The lever by which he overturns the world is light as a feather, and its fulcrum is as down-to-earth as the housewife, the student, the peasant, the worker. Here is capitalist critique and proletarian reasoning fit for our time. In one sense he is equally at home in Brooklyn, Maine, the UK, Italy, Nigeria, Greece, or Indonesia, and in another sense he is just as at home with Æisop and Diogenes of antiquity, the English empiricist philosophers of money in the mercantile epoch, or the various European philosophers of modernity who have held sway in U.S. Academia."
Peter Linebaugh, author of The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All
"These essays reveal not only 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 again explode across the planet."
Nick Dyer-Witheford, author of Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism

In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and the Crisis of Capitalism George Caffentzis ©2013 George Caffentzis This edition ©2013 PM Press

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ISBN: 978-1-60486-335-2 LCCN: 2011939665
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C ommon Notions is an imprint that circulates both enduring and timely formulations of autonomy at the heart of movements beyond capitalism. The series traces a constellation of historical, critical, and visionary meditations on the organization of both domination and its refusal. Inspired by various traditions of autonomism in the United States and around the world, Common Notions aims to provide tools of militant research in our collective reading of struggles past, present, and to come.
Series Editor: Malav Kanuga
[e-mail] | www.commonnotions.org
In the Common Notions series
Selma James, Sex, Race, and Class The Perspective of Winning: A Selection of Writings 1952-2011
Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle
George Caffentzis, In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and the Crisis of Capitalism
Strike Debt, The Debt Resisters’ Operations Manual
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T he essays contained in this volume, written over three decades and in three continents, are the product of much collective work, responding to the political problems faced by the anticapitalist movements in which I have participated. Over the years some of these texts have circulated in different forms, but I appreciate that Common Notions and PM Press have decided to make them available in a book, as the political ideas they articulate are still relevant to the present.
The decision to compile this volume came during a two-week session on the Commons I attended held at Blue Mountain Lake Center organized by Dara Greenwald, who though suffering from the disease that was to destroy her life was a powerful presence, inspiring us all to collaborate and engage in new projects. In this spirit, it was another participant, Malav Kanuga of Common Notions, who suggested that it was time for me to weave these essays together (many still unpublished then) into a cohesive theoretical work. For this and for the assistance he has given me to keep the project moving, I deeply thank him. I also want to thank Ramsey Kanaan of PM Press for joining the project and putting his expertise behind it.
Special thanks go the Midnight Notes Collective, my political "home" for more than thirty years. I thank in particular Michaela Brennan, Steven Colatrella, Dan Coughlin, Peter Linebaugh, Monty Neill, David Riker, Hans Widmer, and John Willshire-Carrera as those who I continue to learn from on a daily basis.
I thank also Silvia Federici, who with her love and wisdom has kept me healthy, sane, and as politically precise as possible. Aside from co-authoring "Mormons in Space," she has been involved in all my writings.
Finally, I want to thank my granddaughter Anna, for she is now turning my thoughts to the future. I hope she will find this book useful when she reads it decades from now.
"The Work/Energy Crisis and the Apocalypse" was originally published in Midnight Notes 2, no. 1 (1980), 1-29. This article was republished in Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, 1973-1992 (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1992) [1980], 215-71.
"Mormons in Space" was originally published in Midnight Notes 2, no. 1 (1982), 3-12. An expanded version was published in Semiotext(e) USA, edited by Jim Fleming and Peter Lamborn Wilson (Brooklyn: Autonomedia/Semiotext(e)).
"The End of Work or the Renaissance of Slavery? A Critique of Rifkin and Negri" was originally published in Common Sense: Journal of the Edinburgh Conference of Socialist Economists 24 (December 1998). This article was revised and republished in Revolutionary Writing: Common Sense Essays in Post-political Politics, edited by Werner Bonefeld (Brooklyn: Autonomedia: 2003), 115-34.
"On Africa and Self-Reproducing Automata" was originally published in The New Enclosures (Brooklyn: Midnight Notes/Autonomedia, 1990), 35-41.
"Why Machines Cannot Create Value: Marx’s Theory of Machines" was originally published in Cutting Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism and Social Revolution, edited by Jim Davis, Thomas Hirschl, and Michael Stack (London: Verso, 1997), 29-56.
"Marx, Turing Machines, and the Labor of Thought" was originally published in Maine Scholar 11 (Autumn 2000): 97-112.
"Crystals and Analytic Engines: Historical and Conceptual Preliminaries to a New Theory of Machines" was originally published as "immaterial and affective labor: explored," in ephemera: theory & politics in organization 7, no. 1, (June 2007): 24-45, http://www.ephemeraweb.org .
"The Power of Money: Debt and Enclosure" was originally published in Altreeragioni: Saggi e documenti 4 (1995): 23-28.
"Notes on the Financial Crisis: From Meltdown to Deep Freeze" was originally published in Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States, edited by Team Colors Collective (Oakland: AK Press, 2010), 273-82.
"On the Notion of a Crisis of Social Reproduction: A Theoretical Review" was originally published in Donne, sviluppo e lavoro di riproduzione, edited by Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Giovanna Della Costa (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1996), 173-209. The English translation of the article was published in Women, Development and Labor of Reproduction: Struggles and Movements, edited by Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Giovanna Della Costa (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press 1999), 153-87.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Part One: Work/Refusal
The Work/Energy Crisis and the Apocalypse
Mormons in Space (with Silvia Federici)
The End of Work or the Renaissance of Slavery? A Critique of Rifkin and Negri
Three Temporal Dimensions of Class Struggle
A Critique of "Cognitive Capitalism"
Part Two: Machines
On Africa and Self-Reproducing Automata
Why Machines Cannost Create Value: Marx’s Theory of Machines
Marx, Turing Machines, and the Labor of Thought
Crystals and Analytic Engines: Historical and Concept