In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and the Crisis of Capitalism

by George Caffentzis

Karl Marx remarked that the only way to write about the origins of capitalism is in the letters of blood and fire used to drive workers from the common lands, forests, and waters in the sixteenth century. In this collection of essays, George Caffentzis argues that the same is true for the annals of twenty-first-century capitalism. Information technology, immaterial production, financialization, and globalization have been trumpeted as inaugurating a new phase of capitalism that puts it beyond its violent origins. Instead of being a period of major social and economic novelty, however, the course of recent decades has been a return to the fire and blood of struggles at the advent of capitalism.Emphasizing class struggles that have proliferated across the social body of global capitalism, Caffentzis shows how a wide range of conflicts and antagonisms in the labor-capital relation express themselves within and against the work process. These struggles are so central to the dynamic of the system that even the most sophisticated machines cannot liberate capitalism from class struggle and the need for labor. Themes of war and crisis permeate the text and are given singular emphasis, documenting the peculiar way in which capital perpetuates violence and proliferates misery on a world scale. This collection draws upon a careful rereading of Marx’s thought in order to elucidate political concerns of the day. Originally written to contribute to the debates of the anticapitalist movement over the last thirty years, this book makes Caffentzis’s writings readily available as tools for the struggle in this period of transition to a common future.

Genres: Politics, Economics, Philosophy, Theory, Nonfiction

304 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 1, 2012

About the author

George Caffentzis (born 1945) is an American political philosopher and an autonomist Marxist. He founded the Midnight Notes Collective, is a founder member of the co-ordinator of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa and a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern Maine.

Reviews

[Zhenia Vasiliev · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great read - enjoyed the discussion that bridges many different themes together, such as class struggle and issues of digital production, Universal Turing Machine and surplus value, and the computability of immaterial labour.

[Rhys · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting essays on the value creation of capital, and the idea of self-reproducing automata that requires no human capital. Some of the essays, however, have not aged well.

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good book - the parts on the transformation problem and the organic composition of capital are particularly instructive. Also instructive is the observation that energy-intensive and capital-intensive industries are often one and the same.

I found the first part of the book to be the most informative, while part two was often repetitive, and part three was great but hurt by the book's essay-based format and might have benefited from some more structure.

Another valuable contribution - and one that I think cries out for continued development - is Caffentzis' frequent framing of both thermodynamics and information theory as ways for better enumerating a Marxist theory of Machines and Automation.

Overall, it was a helpful text - specifically, I liked Caffentzis' meditations on reproductive labor and his refutations of Hardt/Negri's conception of immaterial labor. In Letters of Blood and Fire is a valuable contribution for both environmentalist and left-accelerationist readings of Marx.

Finally, Mormons in Space is an excellent read in the era of Elon Musk.

[Sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Steampunk Marx

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I came to this book from bitter, incendiary 'Energy, Work and Finance' (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...), but what I found was quite different than the bible of thermodynamics & capitalism that I expected.

The best essays in this collection are those that interpret Marx in a dialogue with contemporary (to Marx) technology developments and scientific theories, and then test Marx's theory of value against futuristic attempts at doing away with the limitations of the human being, namely Charles Babbage's analytical machines and Turing's machines. The resulting elegant and steampunk thought experiments are intellectual gems. Caffentzis however, even if eventually triumphing through logic over the motley crew of Marx's adversaries (Rifkin, Hardt & Negri, Sraffa, Mirowski..), actually shows how passée or contingent Marx's theory of value can appear (and, I argue, actually is).

Caffentzis keeps comparing human labor to machines (mechanical or logical), in a sort of Luddite or Scrooge capture, held back by the need to converse with hoary texts rather than with reality, thus ignoring capitalism's invisible holistic grip on society, which goes far beyond, or is other than its refusal to compensate for the reproduction of the labour force (the 'fuck' and the 'shit', drawing on Silvia Federici's intellectually dismal literature). As Rosa Luxembourg has clarified, capitalism needs an outside - society, colonies, nature - to keep in balance and not to explode, for thermodynamic reasons. The tensions are to be found at the boundaries between capitalism's inside and its outside, and this line is always moving, so fast that Caffentzis's painstaking musings on the distinction between physical and cognitive labour seem prehistoric.

For epistemologists.

[David Carrasquillo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those books that I took with a lot of patience because every essay is smart, informative and entertaining. This is a book with a lot of depth. Only to be read if have already read enough about the topics it develops.