18B

I am particularly happy to write this introduction to the English edition of my book on Marx, which came out in Italian in 2014. It is a short book, which weaves a pretty dense conceptual fabric interlacing a close reading of Marx’s texts and the contemporary debates surrounding the question of the ‘production of subjectivity’. I am grateful to Yari Lanci for the passion and...

In this short book, Marx is read beyond Marxism. There is no claim to show why ‘he was right’ and no attempt is pursued to confine him to his time, possibly in order to include his work in a canon of ‘classics’. Marx is rather confronted with the present, in keeping with a lesson I learned once and for all from an Italian classic text published in the 1960s (see Tronti...

You would be quite mistaken in fancying that I am ‘fond’ of books, Marx wrote to his daughter Laura in 1868. Rather, he continued, ‘I am a machine condemned to devour them and, then, throw them, in a changed form, on the dunghill of history’ (MECW, 43: 9–10). The reading of Marx recently presented in Pierre Dardot and Christian...

‘We always want to be with us’, as Bloch wrote in 1921. Therefore, our journey into the Marxian workshops is going to be oriented by the themes we think about and discuss in our present. As previously mentioned, the formula ‘production of subjectivity’ describes the line of enquiry I wish to pursue. In the last thirty years, reflections on ‘the subject’ have...

Although only (and necessarily) in its general outline, we have just sketched the contemporary theoretical field in which the problem of the ‘production of subjectivity’ is posed. Now, it is necessary to say something about the way in which the same problem appeared, under a different name, to the young Marx. As regards political and philosophical concepts, the confrontation...

Marx’s ‘new materialism’ is first and foremost a historical materialism. And history presented itself to Marx and Engels initially as the reign of liberty. As we read in The Holy Family, ‘History does nothing. . . . It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights;...

Since the revolutions of 1848, only a few years passed before Marx referred to them as being ‘but poor incidents – small fractures and fissures in the dry crust of European society’. ‘However’, he added, ‘they denounced the abyss. Beneath the apparently solid surface, they betrayed oceans of liquid matter,...

The concept of ‘abstract labour’ plays a key role in Marx’s theory of value. Marx considers his critical examination of ‘the dual [indeed abstract and concrete] character of the labour embodied in commodities’ as the crux ‘to an understanding of political economy’ (C, I: 132). One of the canonical definitions of the dual character of labour...

To resume the analysis of the conceptual devices Marx primed in the laboratory of the critique of political economy, we now need to dwell on a concept evoked a few times already in the previous two chapters, namely, the concept of ‘labour power’ [Arbeitskraft]. This concept figures only marginally in the Grundrisse where, if anything,...

For Marx, these antagonisms are class antagonisms. Yet what is a ‘class’? The sources of Marx’s use of this concept – the works of the historians and bourgeois economists mentioned in one of his letters to Joseph Weydemeyer in 1852 (MECW, 39: 60ff) – have been amply...

Marx’s critique of political economy, particularly when read from the standpoint of the production of subjectivity, determines a series of displacements of the political. In the previous chapters these displacements were analysed, for instance, in relation to the commodity-form, cooperation and the ‘command’ within the factory. Marx tears off crucial political categories from the...

Marx never went to Detroit and Adam Smith never went to Beijing. Marx did, however, actually stay in Algiers for a couple of months at the beginning of 1882, near the end of his life, hoping to find (in vain) some comfort from the harsh winter in London following his doctor’s advice. As with the well-known works...

The journey through Marx’s texts presented in this short book admittedly did not aim at revealing the outline of a systematic and exhaustive theory of subjectivity and its production. It allowed us, however, to identify the continuity of a problematic throughout Marx’s thought, although he tackled it with different tools over time. We saw how since the early 1840s Marx qualified his...

Adorno, T. W. (2004 [1966]). Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. London; New York: Routledge.

abfangen. See seize

Sandro Mezzadra teaches political theory at the University of Bologna and is research fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. He has been visiting professor and research fellow in several places, including the New School for Social Research (New York), Humboldt University (Berlin) and UNSAM (Buenos Aires).

In recent years, we have witnessed an unprecedented emergence of new forms of radical politics – from Tahrir Square, Gezi Park and the global Occupy movement, to Wikileaks and hacktivism. What is striking about such movements is their rejection of leadership structures and the absence of political demands and agendas. Instead, their originality lies in the autonomous forms of political life...