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Christian Marazzi
Christian Marazzi
	File:Christian Marazzi.jpg
Born	Lugano, Switzerland
Academic career
Field	Finance, Economic Philosophy
School or; tradition	Marxism · Autonomism
Influences	Karl Marx, Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri
Contributions	Postfordism; New Economic Geography

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Christian Marazzi (born in Lugano, Switzerland, in 1951) is an Italian Marxist. He obtained a degree in Political Science at the University of Padova, a master’s degree at the London School of Economics and a doctoral degree in Economics at the City University of London. He has taught at the University of Padova, the State University of New York, and at the University of Lausanne. He is currently Director of Socio-Economic Research at the Scuola Universitaria della Svizzera Italiana.

The Swiss-Italian economist is one of the core theorists of the "Italian Post-Fordism Theory" or "Italian Theory" [1], along with Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, Adelino Zanini, Ubaldo Fadini, Andrea Fumagalli, Sandro Mezzadra, Carlo Vercellone, Maurizio Lazzarato, Cristina Morini e Tiziana Villani.

Capital and Language[edit]

Marazzi's Capital and Language takes as its starting point the fact that the extreme volatility of financial markets is generally attributed to the discrepancy between the "real economy" (that of material goods produced and sold) and the more speculative monetary-financial economy. But this distinction has long ceased to apply in the postfordist New Economy, in which both spheres are structurally affected by language and communication. In Capital and Language Marazzi argues that the changes in financial markets and the transformation of labor into immaterial labor (that is, its reliance on abstract knowledge, general intellect, and social cooperation) are two sides of a new development paradigm: financialization through and thanks to the rise of the new economy.

Capital and Language focuses on the causes behind the international economic and financial depression of 2001, and on the primary instrument that the U.S. government has since been using to face them: war. Marazzi points to capitalism’s fourth stage (after mercantilism, industrialism, and the postfordist culmination of the New Economy): the "War Economy" that is already upon us.

Marazzi offers a radical new understanding of the current international economic stage and crucial post-Marxist guidance for confronting capitalism in its newest form. Capital and Language also provides a warning call to a Left still nostalgic for a Fordist construct—a time before factory turned into office (and office into home), and before labor became linguistic. [2]

In terms of the development of the 'technical and political class-composition', in the post-fordist era the crisis explains at the same time the 'high points of the capitalist development' trough the function of new technological tools (money form, linguistic conventions, capital and language). [Zanini, A. 2010, 'On the Philosophical Foundations of Italian Workerism: A Conceptual Approach', Historical Materialism, 18, 4: 39-63.]

Communication as Work[edit]

While the assembly line (invented by Henry Ford at the beginning of the last century) excluded any form of linguistic productivity, today, there is no production without communication. The new technologies are linguistic machines. This revolution has produced a new kind of worker who is not a specialist but is versatile and infinitely adaptable. If standardized mass production was dominant in the past, today we produce an array of different goods corresponding to specific consumer niches. [3]

Finance and Control Societies[edit]

Individual debt and the management of financial markets are actually techniques for governing the transformations of immaterial labor, general intellect, and social cooperation. The financial crisis has radically undermined the very concept of unilateral and multilateral economico-political hegemony. Marazzi discusses efforts toward a new "geomonetary" order that have emerged around the globe in response of the crisis. [4]