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305 pages

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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.

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Publié par	PM Press
Date de parution	28 février 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781604868371
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	4 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0300€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Praise forIn Letters of Blood and Fire

“George Caffentzis’s essays in this timely collection offer a sharply uncom promising 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 ofThe Commoner: A Web Journal of Other Val uesand author ofThe 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 theencuen trosof 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 ex pressed 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 Æsop and Diogenes of antiquity, the English empiricist philosophers of money in the mercan tile epoch, or the various European philosophers of modernity who have held sway in U.S. Academia.” —Peter Linebaugh, author ofThe 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 ofCyber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

c n a This work is licensed under the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/byncsa/3.0/

ISBN: 9781604863352 LCCN: 2011939665

Cover and interior design: Antumbra Design/antumbradesign.org

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

PM Press PO Box 23912 Oakland, CA 94623 www.pmpress.org

Autonomedia PO Box 568 Williamsburg Station Brooklyn, NY 112110568 www.autonomedia.org

Common Notions 131 8th St. #4 Brooklyn, NY 11215 www.commonnotions.org

Printed in the USA on recycled paper by the Employee Owners of ThomsonShore in Dexter, Michigan. www.thomsonshore.com

ommon Notions is an imprint that circulates both enduring andc timely formulations of autonomy at the heart of movements beyond capitalism. The series traces a constellation of historical, critical, andvisionary meditations on the organization of both domination and itsrefusal. 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 info@commonnotions.org | 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

he essays contained in this volume, written over three decades and in three con t tinents, are the product of much collective work, responding to the political prob lems 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 sug gested 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 de cades from now.

“The Work/Energy Crisis and the Apocalypse” was originally published inMidnight Notes 2, no. 1 (1980), 1–29. This article was republished inMidnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, 1973–1992(Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1992) [1980], 215–71.

“Mormons in Space” was originally published inMidnight Notes 2, no. 1 (1982), 3–12. An expanded version was published inSemiotext(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 inCommon Sense: Journal of the Edinburgh Conference of Socialist Economists24 (December 1998). This article was revised and republished inRevolutionary 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 inThe New Enclosures(Brooklyn: Midnight Notes/Autonomedia, 1990), 35–41.

“Why Machines Cannot Create Value: Marx’s Theory of Machines” was originally published inCutting 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 Scholar11 (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,” inephemera: theory & politics in organization7, no. 1, ( June 2007): 24–45, http://www.ephemeraweb.org.

“The Power of Money: Debt and Enclosure” was originally published inAltreeragioni: Saggi e documenti4 (1995): 23–28.

“Notes on the Financial Crisis: From Meltdown to Deep Freeze” was originally published inUses 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 inDonne, 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 inWomen, 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.

Introduction

pàRT oNE: WORK/rEFUSàl 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”

pàRT twO: MàCHiNES On Africa and SelfReproducing Automata Why Machines Cannot Create Value: Marx’s Theory of Machines Marx, Turing Machines, and the Labor of Thought Crystals and Analytic Engines: Historical and Conceptual Preliminaries to a New Theory of Machines

pàRT tHREE: MONEY, WàR, àND cRiSiS Freezing the Movement and the Marxist Theory of War The Power of Money: Debt and Enclosure Notes on the Financial Crisis: From Meltdown to Deep Freeze On the Notion of a Crisis of Social Reproduction: A Theoretical Review

Bibliography Index

11 58

66 82 95

127 139 164

176

203 236 241 252

273 284