Christian Marazzi Books

"Working by communicating." Our time has witnessed a profound transformation of production processes. While the assembly line excluded any form of language as a directly productive factor, today there is no production without communication: indeed, work and information necessarily overlap to ensure maximum effect in the shortest possible time. This is the advent of new technologies as true linguistic machines. This revolution has imposed a new model of worker, no longer specialized, but versatile, capable of adapting to new needs. While in the past standardized mass production triumphed (it was Henry Ford at the beginning of the century who organized the so-called assembly line in the United States), today differentiated and varied products according to consumer tastes prevail. This is the post-Fordist model that Christian Marazzi focuses on, tracing its developments from Japanese origins to innovations in relation to the political and administrative spheres increasingly directly involved in determining the production process and its consequences.

This updated edition of a groundbreaking work on the global financial crisis presents a postfordist perspective. The 2010 English-language edition made this influential analysis accessible to a broader audience, and the new edition incorporates recent events, including the G20 summit in July 2010, which highlighted a consensus on reducing government spending. Marazzi, a prominent figure in the European postfordist movement, argues that financialization represents a new form of accumulation that reflects contemporary social and cognitive production rather than mere irregularities in traditional economic categories. He posits that the financial crisis is integral to modern accumulation rather than a simple lack of growth. Marazzi illustrates how individual debt and financial market management serve as techniques for governing the transformations of immaterial labor and social cooperation. The crisis has fundamentally challenged concepts of economic-political hegemony, prompting discussions about a new geomonetary order emerging globally. This work offers a fresh perspective on international economics and provides essential post-Marxist insights for addressing capitalism's latest manifestations. The edition includes a glossary of financial capitalism's specialized language, "Words in Crisis," and features a new afterword by Marazzi.

Offering a radical new perspective, a leading theorist in the Italian postfordist movement delves into the complexities of the current international economic landscape. The book challenges conventional views and presents innovative ideas that aim to reshape our understanding of global economics, making it a significant contribution to contemporary economic theory.