The Micro-Politics of Capital Marx and the Prehistory of the Present

Re-reads Marx in light of the contemporary critical interrogation of subjectivity.

What is the relation between the economy, or the mode of production, and culture, beliefs, and desires? How is it possible to think of these relations without reducing one to the other, or effacing one for the sake of the other? To answer these questions, The Micro-Politics of Capital re-reads Marx in light of the contemporary critical interrogations of subjectivity in the works of Althusser, Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, and Negri. Jason Read suggests that what characterizes contemporary capitalism is the intimate intersection of the production of commodities with the production of desire, beliefs, and knowledge.

â??Read produces both an erudite comparative study and reading of Marx, and the resources for a living materialist and communist thought.â?? â?? De Philosophia

"Jason Read's book contains the most original and incisive readings of Marx's texts that I have read in years, along with equally penetrating analyses of Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari. He demonstrates beautifully along the way that French poststructuralism is not opposed to Marxism, but that the two are in fact intimately related in their theories of the production of subjectivity. The book helps reorient our understandings of both Marxism and poststructuralism." â?? Michael Hardt, coauthor of Empire

"This book represents a thoughtful reconsideration of Marx's notion of the mode of production and does so in a way that is likely to appeal to a new and younger readership by showing that mode of production is not simply an economic concept but one that can explain the forms of subjectivity peculiar to different kinds of social organization. The theoretical framework of the book is refreshingly broad; the author draws from a number of theoretical and philosophical schools and cannot easily be categorized as 'Deleuzean' or 'Althusserian.' This represents the perspective of a generation no longer constrained by the notion of opposing theoretical camps so prevalent in the 1980s and '90s." â?? Warren Montag, author of Louis Althusser
Table Of Contents

Introduction: There Is No Time Like the Present

1. The Use and Disadvantage of Prehistory for Life: Marx's "Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations" and the Constitution of the Subject of Labor

Primitive Accumulation
Immanent Causality
The Prehistory of Capitalism
Production
Antagonistic Logic (Part One)

2. What Is Living and What is Dead in the Philosophy of Karl Marx: The Politics and Ontology of Living Labor

Abstract Labor
Living Labor
Disciplinary Power
Antagonistic Logic (Part Two)
The Production of Subjectivity

3. The Real Subsumption of Subjectivity by Capital

Real Subsumption
The Fragment on Machines
Immaterial Labor
Subjectivity: From Reproduction to Production
The Common

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index