Maurizio Lazzarato Libros

The Italian philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato reveals the underpinnings of contemporary subjectivity in the aesthetics and politics of mass media. This book discloses the conceptual groundwork of Lazzarato's thought as a whole for a time when his writings have become increasingly influential.

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.

A new and radical reexamination of today's neoliberalist new economy through the political lens of the debtor/creditor relation.

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

In Experimental Politics, Maurizio Lazzarato examines the conditions of work, employment, and unemployment in neoliberalism's flexible and precarious labor market. This is the first book of Lazzarato's in English that fully exemplifies the unique synthesis of sociology, activist research, and theoretical innovation that has generated his best-known concepts, such as immaterial labor. The book (published in France in 2009) is also groundbreaking in the way it brings Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari to bear on the analysis of concrete political situations and real social struggles, while making a significant theoretical contribution in its own right. Lazzarato draws on the experiences of casual workers in the French entertainment industry during a dispute over the reorganization (reform) of their unemployment insurance in 2004 and 2005. He sees this conflict as the first testing ground of a political program of social reconstruction. The payment of unemployment insurance would become the principal instrument for control over the mobility and behavior of the workers. The flexible and precarious workforce of the entertainment industry prefigured what the entire workforce in contemporary societies is in the process of becoming: in Foucault's words, a floating population in security societies.

Experts, pundits, and politicians agree: public debt is hindering growth and increasing unemployment. Governments must reduce debt at all cost if they want to restore confidence and get back on a path to prosperity. Maurizio Lazzarato's diagnosis, however, is completely different: under capitalism, debt is not primarily a question of budget and economic concerns but a political relation of subjection and enslavement. Debt has become infinite and unpayable. It disciplines populations, calls for structural reforms, justifies authoritarian crackdowns, and even legitimizes the suspension of democracy in favor of "technocratic governments" beholden to the interests of capital. The 2008 economic crisis only accelerated the establishment of a "new State capitalism, " which has carried out a massive confiscation of societies' wealth through taxes. And who benefits? Finance capital. In a calamitous return to the situation before the two world wars, the entire process of accumulation is now governed by finance, which has absorbed sectors it once ignored, like higher education, and today is often identified with life itself. Faced with the current catastrophe and the disaster to come, Lazzarato contends, we must overcome capitalist valorization and reappropriate our existence, knowledge, and technology. In Governing by Debt, Lazzarato confronts a wide range of thinkers -- from Félix Guattari and Michel Foucault to David Graeber and Carl Schmitt -- and draws on examples from the United States and Europe to argue that it is time that we unite in a collective refusal of this most dire status quo.-- Provided by publisher

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.