Maurizio Lazzarato Libros

An analysis of how capitalism today produces subjectivity like any other good, and what would allow us to escape its hold.

Why we must reject the illusory consolations of technology and choose revolution over fascism. We are living in apocalyptic times. In Capital Hates Everyone, famed sociologist Maurice Lazzarato points to a stark choice emerging from the magma of today's world events: fascism or revolution. Fascism now drives the course of democracies as they grow less and less liberal and increasingly subject to the law of capital. Since the 1970s, Lazzarato writes, capital has entered a logic of war. It has become, by the power conferred on it by financialization, a political force intent on destruction. Lazzarato urges us to reject the illusory consolations of a technology-abetted "new" kind of capitalism and choose revolution over fascism.

Exploring the relationship between capitalism and conflict, Lazzarato illustrates how capitalist expansion leads to imperialist wars. The book delves into the economic motivations behind warfare, arguing that financial interests drive nations to engage in conflict, ultimately revealing the intertwined nature of war and money in shaping global politics.

An acute reappraisal for our time of the very concept of revolution. In order to be effective, union struggles, struggles for national liberation, worker mutualism, or struggles for emancipation were strategies that were necessarily connected to revolution. Starting from the historic defeat of the global Revolution in the mid-1970s, this book draws a portrait—whose elaboration is still lacking—of the concept of revolution. What conditions could lead us to speak of revolution once again? In The Intolerable Present, the Urgency of Revolution, Maurizio Lazzarato ponders the fundamental importance of the passage from the historical class struggle (the conflict between capital and labor) to the more recent class struggles that open onto plural trajectories: social, sexual, gender, and race struggles. Expanding the notion of class as a rejoinder to the normative appropriation of minority politics, the revolution is returned as the horizon where subjection can be resorbed. In this sense, Marxist, feminist, anticolonial, and postcolonial theories provide the necessary critical tools to understand the relations between classes and minorities, between the global North and the global South, and between the time of revolutions and the eruption of new subjectivities.

Experts and politicians claim public debt hampers growth and fuels unemployment, urging governments to reduce it to restore confidence and prosperity. However, Maurizio Lazzarato presents a contrasting view: under capitalism, debt transcends mere economic issues, representing a political relationship of subjugation. He argues that debt has become infinite and unpayable, serving to discipline populations, necessitate structural reforms, and justify authoritarian measures, even undermining democracy in favor of "technocratic governments" that cater to capital interests. The 2008 crisis intensified the emergence of "new State capitalism," facilitating a significant appropriation of societal wealth through taxation, primarily benefiting finance capital. This scenario mirrors pre-World War II conditions, where finance governs accumulation, increasingly infiltrating sectors like higher education and becoming synonymous with life itself. Lazzarato asserts that in light of current and impending crises, we must transcend capitalist valorization and reclaim our existence, knowledge, and technology. In this work, he engages with a variety of thinkers, including Félix Guattari and Michel Foucault, and uses examples from the U.S. and Europe to advocate for a collective rejection of the prevailing dire status quo.

This volume takes its cue from the ethnological concept of animism, a term for religions that view objects as having souls of their own. Animism emerged as an anthropological category in the nineteenth century, often occurring as a folk belief underlying more established religions, particularly in Africa and Southeast Asia. The term has proved also influential in psychoanalysis, where it denotes mental states in which no division is made between inner and outer realities. This volume brings together artworks, documents and artifacts to create an essayistic appraisal of works by such artists and filmmakers as Didier Demorcy, Walt Disney, Jimmie Durham, Eric Duvivier, Henri Michaux, Thomas Alva Edison, Candida Hofer, Luis Jacob, Ken Jacobs, Yayoi Kusama, Len Lye, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Daria Martin, Ana Mendieta, Hans Richter and others.