Maurizio Lazzarato

Last updated

What is credit/debt in its most elementary sense? A promise of payment. What is a financial asset, a share, or bond? The promise of future value. "Promise", "value," and "future" are also key words in Nietzsche's Second Essay. For Nietzsche, the "oldest and most personal relationship there is" is that between creditor and debtor, a relationship wherein "person met person for the first time, and measured himself person against person." Consequently, the task of a community or society has first of all been to engender a person capable of promising, someone able to stand guarantor for himself in the creditor-debtor relationship, that is, capable of honoring his debt. Making a person capable of keeping a promise means constructing a memory for him, endowing him with interiority, a conscience, which provide a bulwark against forgetting. It is within the domain of debt obligations that memory, subjectivity, and conscience begin to be produced.

— The Making of the Indebted Man, pp. 39-40.

Lazzarato refers to the socializing process of creating individual subjects as "subjectivation". [8] He also contrasts the Nietzschean view of credit/debt with those given by Marx and by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus . The latter part of the book is a criticism of debt as used in European neoliberal governance, introducing ideas which are developed more fully in Governing by Debt.

The Making of the Indebted Man has proved crucial for the application of the theorizing of neoliberal debt in relation to material culture and contemporary art. [9]

Governing by Debt

In Governing by Debt, Lazzarato uses the vocabulary developed in Making of the Indebted Man to examine how debt is employed by states and private enterprise, as opposed to individuals. The book is a critique of neoliberalism and governmentality where the latter refers to a form of government which responds to economic demands, a notion closely related to ordoliberalism. Lazzarato characterizes American student debt as an ideal example of the credit/debt economy, and also uses history and anthropology to trace a cultural notion of "infinite debt" (e.g. life-debt, original sin) which he argues has informed the modern economy. [10]

The book's central idea is that basic categories of the economic and political spheres (which are commonly opposed, or spoken of as separate items) are in fact not distinct, but closely related and overlapping. For example, governments and businesses closely coordinate their policies, laws, business practices and expectations, and are therefore coupled with each other. Lazzarato cites the work of Carl Schmitt to illustrate the point. [lower-alpha 1] Lazzarato also cites Foucault's work The Birth of Biopolitics to illustrate the social experience of debt; however he criticizes the distinction that Foucault makes between states and economies, with classical liberalism as a mediator. [12] Further, the distinction between industrial capitalism and financial capitalism is questioned; however Lazzarato retains the distinction in the sense that financial capitalism is the "purest" form of capitalism, because it simply transforms one form of money into another form of money through valorization (e.g. via the circulation and trade of financial products), without using a commodity as an intermediate step. In Marxist terminology, this is expressed as M-M' (money creating different money), as opposed to M-C-M' (money creating a commodity, which yields different money). Lazzarato also cites Lenin's work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism to indicate the primacy of financial capitalism, emergent during Lenin's period. [13]

Lazzarato concludes the text by proposing refusal of work as a technique for the disruption of the modern economy. He advocates for this goal because he attributes responsibility for human suffering during financial crises to capitalists and state actors, and not to any national population. However (in Lazzarato's account) national populations are nevertheless made to pay for such crises and socialized to feel responsibility for them, through taxation, austerity, and media messaging:

The state, technocratic governments, and the media [must therefore] invest considerable energy to ensure a population's guilt for a debt into which it has never entered and, therefore, its responsibility for faults it has never committed. The laws, speeches, articles, and slogans deployed to this end are directly proportional to the scope of the fraud. During the crisis, technocratic governments have moved to construct a memory of debt not for individuals but for entire nations. The violence of taxes and appropriations is the privileged instrument, for only that which inflicts pain is engraved in memory, only that which hurts registers and remains inscribed in consciousness (Nietzsche).

— Governing by Debt, p. 42.

Capital Hates Everyone and The Intolerable Present

In the early 2020s, Lazzarato published another pair of closely related works, centering on the theme of anti-capitalism. Capital Hates Everyone is an anti-capitalist polemic, while The Intolerable Present, the Urgency of Revolution is a text which argues for the necessity of global revolution, and also for a need to incorporate race and sex into the classical Marxist conception of history, which instead focuses on class. [14] [15]

In Capital Hates Everyone, Lazzarato claims that the installation of a liberal or neoliberal form of government is a necessary but insufficient condition for capitalism to operate in a given country or region. In order for capitalism to function, he claims that it is also necessary for a historical conflict to take place, which then creates a class of defeated "losers" [16] who are then either subsumed into capitalism or killed. Examples include victims of European colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade, victims of the Chilean Pinochet government—supported by the United States—and other leftists or revolutionaries who are defeated in historical conflicts. In the polemic, Lazzarato therefore attributes several negative traits to capitalism, arguing that warfare, [17] racism and other negative phenomena are not incidental to the functioning of capitalism, but essential to it.

Lazzarato also examines the concept of the machine as it relates both to capitalism and anti-capitalist movements. In one example, Lazzarato cites Frantz Fanon to indicate the importance of radio broadcasts throughout the Algerian War. Initially used by the French as a tool for French state messaging within Algeria, radio broadcasts were later appropriated by Algerian militants to communicate their own anti-colonial messaging. [18] Although Lazzarato discusses technical machines such as the radio, he also points to "social machines" or "war machines", borrowing the latter concept from A Thousand Plateaus , a work by the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. [19] For Lazzarato, social machines and war machines refer not to literal, technical machines, but rather to human organizations whose members share certain worldviews, ideas or ideologies, and therefore work together to accomplish specific goals. This process gives rise to the use or invention of some technical machines for the purpose of realizing the organization's goals, and Lazzarato therefore attaches greater importance to social/war machines than to technical machines. In the above example, the French government sought to maintain control of Algeria, and therefore used the (already existing) technology of radio as a tool to aid this goal. The technical machine, radio, was later appropriated by another war machine—the Algerian militants—for their contrary goal of Algerian independence.

In The Intolerable Present, Lazzarato argues that the ordinary functioning of capitalism depends not only on the waged labor of the (male European) proletariat, but also requires a steady influx of unpaid or underpaid labor from other sectors of the global population for its social reproduction. [20] These other sectors include slave labor carried out by black slaves captured during the Atlantic slave trade, unpaid "women's work" performed in many households, and underpaid labor performed by workers throughout the "periphery" of the Global South, all of which aid the functioning of capitalism in the "center" of the Global North. According to Lazzarato, these forms of labor and oppression are not typically emphasized by classical or orthodox Marxism, which instead focuses on the relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in Europe. He therefore argues that classical Marxist ideology must be revised in order to account for phenomena based in race and sex, in order to better understand the functioning of capitalism as a global phenomenon. [21]

Lazzarato also notes that Marx's prediction that proletarian revolution would occur first in developed, Western European countries was historically proven false by the revolutions which occurred in Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, and throughout Africa. According to Lazzarato, the people in these regions could not afford to wait for ideal revolutionary conditions to develop, a notion associated with classical, European Marxism. Rather, they were variously forced to make immediate revolutionary breaks because their given circumstances were "intolerable", per the book's title word:

The time for action by free labor revolutions was no longer the future, as it was for the European labor movement in the nineteenth century, but the present, raising questions for historicism and the socialists' confidence in progress. The urgency of the here and now meant that revolution could not wait for any technological gap to be filled, or to catch up in terms of development, because the violence, exploitation and misery were intolerable!

— The Intolerable Present, the Urgency of Revolution, p. 103.

Toward the end of The Intolerable Present, Lazzarato acknowledges the concept of intersectionality—due to Kimberlé Crenshaw—which posits that an individual may experience multiple forms of discrimination due to simultaneous membership in distinct demographic groups: e.g. a black woman may simultaneously experience racism because she is black, and sexism because she is a woman. Although Lazzarato acknowledges that the idea of intersectionality is pertinent to his discussion, he expresses preference for the Combahee River Collective Statement, a manifesto issued in 1977 by a group of American black lesbian women. The Combahee River Collective Statement briefly outlines its members' experiences in American social movements centering on race and sex, particularly the civil rights movement and second-wave feminism. [22] For Lazzarato, whereas the concept of intersectionality is closely associated with an American juridical context, the Combahee River Collective Statement has greater revolutionary potential, because it entails simultaneously struggling against racism and sexism, two forms of discrimination which Lazzarato argues support capitalism on a global level.

As in his earlier works on debt, Lazzarato concludes by advocating for refusal of work as a technique to halt the functioning of capitalism.

Works

Notes

  1. ↑ "Schmitt critiques 'liberal' thinking and its claim to neutralize the political nature of the economy by transforming it into 'economics'. From the lofty perspective of its scientific knowledge, economics asserts that the political solution to the 'social question' depends on the growth of production and consumption, which can be understood and function only according to the laws of the market. Conversely, Schmitt argues that the economy is the contemporary form of the political such that the international division of labor represents the 'true constitution of the earth today'. [11]

[24]

Related Research Articles

Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price systems, private property, property rights recognition, voluntary exchange, and wage labor. In a market economy, decision-making and investments are determined by owners of wealth, property, or ability to maneuver capital or production ability in capital and financial markets—whereas prices and the distribution of goods and services are mainly determined by competition in goods and services markets.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Félix Guattari</span> Psychoanalyst and philosopher (1930–1992)

Pierre-Félix Guattari was a French psychoanalyst, political philosopher, semiotician, social activist, and screenwriter. He co-founded schizoanalysis with Gilles Deleuze, and ecosophy with Arne Næss, and is best known for his literary and philosophical collaborations with Deleuze, most notably Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), the two volumes of their theoretical work Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anti-capitalism</span> Political ideology and movement opposed to capitalism

Anti-capitalism is a political ideology and movement encompassing a variety of attitudes and ideas that oppose capitalism. In this sense, anti-capitalists are those who wish to replace capitalism with another type of economic system, such as socialism or communism.

Neoliberalism, also neo-liberalism, is a term used to signify the late-20th century political reappearance of 19th-century ideas associated with free-market capitalism, which had fallen into decline following the Second World War. The term has multiple, competing definitions, and is often used pejoratively. In scholarly use, the term is frequently undefined or used to characterize a vast variety of phenomena.

Anarchist economics is the set of theories and practices of economic activity within the political philosophy of anarchism. Many anarchists are anti-authoritarian anti-capitalists, with anarchism usually referred to as a form of libertarian socialism, i.e. a stateless system of socialism. Anarchists support personal property and oppose capital concentration, interest, monopoly, private ownership of productive property such as the means of production, profit, rent, usury and wage slavery which are viewed as inherent to capitalism.

A theory of capitalism describes the essential features of capitalism and how it functions. The history of various such theories is the subject of this article.

The theory of state monopoly capitalism was initially a Marxist thesis popularised after World War II. Lenin had claimed in 1916 that World War I had transformed laissez-faire capitalism into monopoly capitalism, but he did not publish any extensive theory about the topic. The term refers to an environment where the state intervenes in the economy to protect larger monopolistic or oligopolistic businesses from threats. As conceived by Lenin in his pamphlet of the same name, the theory aims to describe the final historical stage of capitalism, of which he believed the Imperialism of that time to be the highest expression.

In critical theory, deterritorialization is the process by which a social relation, called a territory, has its current organization and context altered, mutated or destroyed. The components then constitute a new territory, which is the process of reterritorialization.

Reterritorialization is the restructuring of a place or territory that has experienced deterritorialization. Deterritorialization is a term created by Deleuze and Guattari in their philosophical project Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972–1980). They distinguished that relative deterritorialization is always accompanied by reterritorialization. It is the design of the new power. For example, when the Spanish conquered the Aztecs, and after the Spanish deterritorialized by eliminating the symbols of the Aztecs' beliefs and rituals, the Spanish then reterritorialized by putting up their own beliefs and rituals. This form of propaganda established their takeover of the land. Propaganda is an attempt to reterritorialize by influencing people's ideas through information distributed on a large scale. For example, during World War I, the U.S. put up posters everywhere to encourage young men to join the military and fight.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Criticism of capitalism</span> Arguments against the economic system of capitalism

Criticism of capitalism is a critique of political economy that involves the rejection of, or dissatisfaction with the economic system of capitalism and its outcomes. Criticisms typically range from expressing disagreement with particular aspects or outcomes of capitalism to rejecting the principles of the capitalist system in its entirety.

Minority is a philosophical concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their books Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (1975), A Thousand Plateaus (1980), and elsewhere. In these texts, they criticize the concept of "majority". For Deleuze and Guattari, "becoming-minor(itarian)" is primarily an ethical action, one of the becomings one is affected by when avoiding "becoming-fascist". They argued further that the concept of a "people", when invoked by subordinate groups or those aligned with them, always refers to a minority, whatever its numerical power might be.

Autonomism, also known as Autonomist Marxism, is an anti-capitalist social movement and Marxist-based theoretical current that first emerged in Italy in the 1960s from workerism. Later, post-Marxist and anarchist tendencies became significant after influence from the Situationists, the failure of Italian far-left movements in the 1970s, and the emergence of a number of important theorists including Antonio Negri, who had contributed to the 1969 founding of Potere Operaio as well as Mario Tronti, Paolo Virno and Franco "Bifo" Berardi.

A line of flight or a line of escape is a concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their work Capitalism and Schizophrenia. It describes one out of three lines forming what Deleuze and Guattari call assemblages, and serves as a factor in an assemblage that ultimately allows it to change and adapt to said changes, which can be associated with new sociological, political and psychological factors. Translator Brian Massumi notes that in French, "Fuite covers not only the act of fleeing or eluding but also flowing, leaking, and disappearing into the distance. It has no relation to flying."

Semiotext(e) is an independent publisher of critical theory, fiction, philosophy, art criticism, activist texts and non-fiction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sylvère Lotringer</span> French literary critic (1938–2021)

Sylvère Lotringer was a French-born literary critic and cultural theorist. Initially based in New York City, he later lived in Los Angeles and Baja California, Mexico. He is best known for synthesizing French theory with American literary, cultural and architectural avant-garde movements as founder of the journal Semiotext(e) and for his interpretations of theory in a 21st-century context. He is regarded as an influential interpreter of Jean Baudrillard's theories, among others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Franco Berardi</span> Italian philosopher and activist

Franco "Bifo" Berardi is an Italian Marxist philosopher, theorist and activist in the autonomist tradition, whose work mainly focuses on the role of the media and information technology within post-industrial capitalism. Berardi has written over two dozen published books, as well as a number of essays and speeches.

In Marxist theory and Marxian economics, the immiseration thesis, also referred to as emiseration thesis, is derived from Karl Marx's analysis of economic development in capitalism, implying that the nature of capitalist production stabilizes real wages, reducing wage growth relative to total value creation in the economy. Even if real wages rise, therefore, the overall labor share of income decreases, leading to the increasing power of capital in society.

Impossibilism is a Marxist theory that stresses the limited value of political, economic, and social reforms under capitalism. As a doctrine, impossibilism views the pursuit of such reforms as counterproductive to the goal of achieving socialism as they stabilize, and therefore strengthen, support for capitalism. Impossibilism holds that reforms to capitalism are irrelevant or outright counter-productive to the goal of achieving socialism and should not be a major focus of socialist politics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tiziana Terranova</span> Italian theorist and activist

Tiziana Terranova is an Italian theorist and activist whose work focuses on the effects of information technology on society through concepts such as digital labor and commons. Terranova has published the monograph Network Culture. Politics for the Information Age, as well as a more extensive number of essays and speeches, and appeared as a keynote speaker in several conferences. She lectures on the digital media cultures and politics in the Department of Human and Social Sciences, at the University of Naples, 'L'Orientale'.

Immaterial labor is a Marxist framework to describe how value is produced from affective and cognitive activities, which, in various ways, are commodified in capitalist economies. The concept of immaterial labor was coined by Italian sociologist and philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato in his 1996 essay "Immaterial Labor", published as a contribution to Radical Thought in Italy and edited by Virno and Hardt. It was re-published in 1997 as: Lavoro immateriale. Forme di vita e produzione di soggettività.. Lazzarato was a participant in the Years of Lead (Italy) group as a student in Padua in the 1970s, and is a member of the editorial group of the journal Multitudes. Post-Marxist scholars including Franco Berardi, Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Judith Revel, and Paolo Virno, among others have also employed the concept.

References

  1. ↑ Lazzarato, Maurizio (1996). Les machines à cristalliser le temps : perception et travail dans le post-fordisme (Ph.D.). Université de Paris VIII. OCLC   491240299 . Retrieved July 7, 2017.
  2. ↑ "Angela Melitopoulos & Maurizio Lazzarato - Assemblages". Arsenal Forum. Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art. 2010. Retrieved July 8, 2017.
  3. ↑ Murphy, Timothy; Lazzarato, Mauricio (2007). "Strategies of the Political Entrepreneur". SubStance. 36 (112): 86. doi:10.1353/sub.2007.0018. JSTOR   415285. S2CID   144820927.
  4. ↑ Han, Sam (2008). Navigating technomedia: caught in the Web. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield.
  5. ↑ Virno, Hardt, Paolo, Michael (1996). Radical thought in Italy: A potential politics. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  6. ↑ Lazzarato, Maurizio (2012). The Making of the Indebted Man. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 13. Semiotext(e). ISBN   9781584351153.
  7. ↑ Lazzarato, Maurizio (2015). Governing by Debt. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 17. Semiotext(e). ISBN   9781584351634.
  8. ↑ The Making of the Indebted Man, p. 42.
  9. ↑ Simon, Joshua (2013). Neomaterialism. Berlin: Sternberg Press. pp. 39–60. ISBN   978-3-943365-08-5.
  10. ↑ Governing by Debt, pp. 61-79.
  11. ↑ Governing by Debt, pp. 46-47.
  12. ↑ Governing by Debt, pp. 91-92.
  13. ↑ Governing by Debt, pp. 213-222.
  14. ↑ Lazzarato, Maurizio (2021). Capital Hates Everyone: Fascism or Revolution. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 29. Semiotext(e). ISBN   9781635901382.
  15. ↑ Lazzarato, Maurizio (2023). The Intolerable Present, the Urgency of Revolution: Minorities and Classes. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 35. Semiotext(e). ISBN   9781635901818.
  16. ↑ Capital Hates Everyone, p. 21.
  17. ↑ Capital Hates Everyone, pp. 66-67.
  18. ↑ Capital Hates Everyone, pp. 137-144.
  19. ↑ Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix (1987). "1227: Treatise on Nomadology-The War Machine". A Thousand Plateaus . University of Minnesota Press. pp. 351–423. ISBN   9780816614028.
  20. ↑ The Intolerable Present, p. 25.
  21. ↑ The Intolerable Present, p. 21.
  22. ↑ "(1977) The Combahee River Collective Statement". Blackpast. 16 November 2012.
  23. ↑ Gratton, Peter (July 15, 2015). "Company of One: The Fate of Democracy in an Age of Neoliberalism". LA Review of Books.
  24. ↑ Charbonneau, M., & Hansen, M. P. (2014). Debt, Neoliberalism and Crisis: Interview with Maurizio Lazzarato on the Indebted Condition. Sociology, 48(5), 1039-1047
Maurizio Lazzarato
Maurizio Lazzarato DCRL Interview.jpg
Lazzarato in 2014
Born1955 (age 68–69)
Nationality Italian
Occupationscholar
Academic background
EducationPh.D.
Alma mater Université de Paris VIII
Thesis 'Les machines à cristalliser le temps : perception et travail dans le post-fordisme [1]  (1996)
Doctoral advisor Jean-Marie Vincent
Influences Marx, Nietzsche, Deleuze
Historical persons
Contemporary persons
Terminology and related topics
Theater, movies, music and art
Literature
Communities
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.