Capital And Language: From The New Economy To The War Economy (semiotext(e) Foreign Agents)

SEMIOTEXT (E) FOREIGN AGENTS SERIES © 2008 Semiotext(e) © 2002 DeriveApprodi All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo­ copying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher. Published by Semiotext(e} 2007 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 427, Los Angeles, CA 90057 www.semiotexte.com Special thanks to Robert Dewhurst for copyediting. Cover art by Claire Fontaine In God They Trust, 2005 (1966, A.P.) Twenty-five cent coin, stainless box-cutter blade, solder and rivet. Courtesy the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, NY Back Cover Photography by Marco Dotti Design by Hedi El Kholti ISBN: 978-1-58435-067-5 Distributed by T he MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England Printed in the United States of America CAPITAL AND LANGUAGE FROM THE NEW ECONOMY TO THE WAR ECONOMY Christian Marazzi Introduction by Michael Hardt Translated by Gregory Conti Contents Introduction: Language at Work 7 1. From Post-Fordism to the New Economy 13 2. The New Business Cycle 69 3. The Return of Surplus Value 101 4. War and the Business Cycle 145 Bibliography 159 Introduction Language at Work Capital and Language is the first of Christian Marazzi's books to appear in English, and it is long overdue. A native of Ticino, the Italian canton of Switzerland, Marazzi got interested very early in Italian Workerism and participated actively to the Autonomia movement in Italy in the 1 970s. After finishing his doctorate at the London City Universi ty, he joined the University of Padova, where he became a close friend of Ferrucio Gambino, Luciano Ferrari Bravo, Sergio Bologna, and Toni Negri. In 1977, he taught Negri's classes at Padova before being forced in turn to leave Italy. For a few years he lived in New York, London, and Montreal, and contributed to giving the problematics of Italian Workerism a multinational dimension. Rare enough are those economists who can communicate to a general public the complexities of financial markets and economic policy. Christian Marazzi is of even a rarer breed of economist who is also able to engage and advance the most exciting veins of contemporary political and social theory, using these theoretical lenses to read economic developments and reflecting back on those theories with feet solidly planted on the economic terrain. What is specific about his work is its creative engagement with the hypothesis developed by Autonomia and the "post-workerist" 7 perspective: worker struggles precede and prefigure the successive restructurings of capital, and those restructurings provide new possibilities for worker power. Beginning in the 1990s Marazzi published a series of books analyzing the post-Fordist economy, that is, the economic condition, whose beginnings trace back to the 1 970s, in which economic production in the dominant countries is no longer centered on the factory, labor processes are no longer governed by the Taylorist rationality and discipline typical of the assembly line, and Fordist wage relations no longer function as a guarantee of social reproduction . Marazzi focused specifically on two crucial areas of the so-called "New Economy" : the financial sector, which has come to play an increasingly central and guiding role in the economy, and the newly dominant forms of social labor. The series began in 1 995 with II posto dei calz