The Violence of Financial Capitalism, new edition (Semiotext(e) / Intervention Series)

The first third or so of this little book is now dated. The author is writing from the perspective of two or three years from the start of the Great Recession. Circumstances have changed since, though not entirely for the better. The remainder of the book, however, turns to scathing, fairly technical analysis of the rot in the international banking and investment system. Marazzi is clearly worried about the state of the financial system. He doesn't indulge in the usual apocalyptic predictions of the left--in fact, he offers quite a few recommendations for reform-- and this gives the book a refreshing intellectual honesty. A challenging book, but well worth it.

I write this review somewhat reluctantly. Over the years, I have bought and enjoyed quite a few of Semiotext(e)'s offerings, including "The Coming Insurrection", the first volume in their "Intervention" series. They provide a much-needed service in offering cutting-edge European theory and politics, much of it in translation, on what is probably a shoe-string budget.But there really is no excuse for this edition of Christian Marazzi's "The Violence of Financial Capitalism", the second of the "Intervention" editions. (Marazzi is a leading theorist of the Italian post-Fordist school). I was looking for a left-progressive critique of the current global crisis of capitalism. What I got was something approaching incoherence and illiteracy. There is hardly a sentence that does not scream out for the editor's pencil. And then there are the factual errors. On the first page of text, we are informed that Citigroup, B. of A., and UBS went bankrupt. A few mind-boggling pages later, the math is so sloppy that the UK's economy is presented as 100 times that of the US. Frequently, by the time the reader reaches the end of a sentence, it has nothing to do with how that sentence began. Think I'm exaggerating? Try this: "It is a question of writing, highly valued in the US, into the statutes of the Fund, the obligation to the convertibility into a capital account (a convertibility that Keynes, during the preparatory work on the Bretton Woods agreements, resisted with all his force) where before there was only the convertibility into a current account." Or try this definition of a "price/earning (sic) ratio": "If, for instance, the price earning ratio of a share equals 15, the stock pays 15 x for generated earnings (example: with a P/E ratio of 15 and a share price of $1, we have an earning rate of 6.7%)" A Ponzi scheme "or an airplane game [allows] those who came in first to be renumbered." Really.I think one can fairly ascribe this mess mainly, but not entirely, to the translator who may also be responsible for some of the factual errors. This is certainly the worst-translated book I have ever read, and I've read quite a few. Marazzi's "Capital and Language", also issued by Semiotext)e) was at least comprehensible, if somewhat clunky. I have an MBA in finance and used to host a radio talk show on economic issues but after struggling with this for several hours, I simply have no idea what the author is trying to say. Shame on you, Semiotext(e). Where were the editors?

There are few books I cannot finish (I made it though Atlas Shrugged, for Christ's sake) but sadly, this one will join that short list after only penetrating 50 pages in about 6 months. It is sad because I think the book had some real potential and because even in those 50 pages there were some gems.Those gems aside, however, this book is not light reading material and that material is made close to impossible by the very poor translation into English and the erratic editing.I expected more from this publisher and this author. I probably could have soldiered on but I simply don't have time to work this hard for knowledge I can get elsewhere.I will give it two stars for its potential which was apparent.

I found parts of this book very illuminating, particularly the third chapter, which passes from an analysis of the financial crisis considered from the "distributive" point of view to what Marazzi calls a "productive point of view." Only this shift, he tells us, allows us to avoid the impasses of time-worn reactions to separate finance capital as "parasitic" from the real economy of producing things; it allows us, instead, to see contemporary forms of finance as increasingly embedded in new forms of producing value. Marazzi offers an excellent of new phenomena like crowdsourcing, "free" labor and the emerging consumer-as-producer in order to show how the increasing externality of the capital to the producing process implies an entirely new concept of accumulation, one no longer focused on investing in constant and variable capital, but in summoning sources of free labor whose autonomous productivity is then siphoned off through apparatuses of capture (Marazzi, along with Carlo Vercellone, speak of the "capitalist rent" rather than profit to account for this new situation).I don't know how good the translation is, and the technical aspects of the first two chapters make it hard for me to judge their value. But as I mention above, I think this book--or, really, the third chapter--is an important contribution to contemporary theories of "biocapitalism." I recently read Hardt and Negri's Commonwealth, which shares many of the theses of this book, but found this one more useful and insightful.Again, whatever the translation problems I am truly grateful to semiotexte for publishing books like this, which no one else will publish.

I am a close follower of the work of Marazzi, mostly however through translations into French and from the original italian. I find this translation into English absolutely horrible. If you MUST purchase this book, then do so, but if you can read the original work in Italian or if you can find it translated into another language then I would try that first. I like Semiotext(e) and want to continue supporting them, but I can't do so if they continue to be so sloppy. Sorry Sylvère.

Let me just say that the translation, as the other review on this page suggests, is not great at points. I can't read Italian, so I've hardly got much of an option, but one imagines when reading this that it could be better. Versus other books in this series that have been translated from Italian (I'm thinking here of the absolutely wonderful The Making of the Indebted Man by Lazzarato), it doesn't quite hit the spot.That being said, I disagree with the one-star rating. Marazzi is a wonderful thinker, as he's already shown in his previous substantive works. If you can stick with it--the book (and translation?) definitely improves as it goes along--there is much to be gained from this.Though it is tough at times, Marazzi really picks apart the logics of financialised capitalism in a remarkable way. Although he isn't alone on this front, he does a great job of trying to move beyond the notion that financial capitalism is somehow 'parasitic' on a 'real' economy (an economy that produces material objects and goods). Rather, as Marazzi traces, financial capitalism is a change in the valorisation process. That is, reworking Marx's thesis, valorisation (the process of value extraction) no longer occurs at the point where goods are produced and labour is undertaken, but it now takes place in the realm of circulation. He is only too aware of the human and social consequences of the changes, and draws upon theories of biocapitalism and his fellow autonomist thinkers to articulate this.The afterword is a concise response to the crisis that we see today following the 2007/8 financial crash. Marazzi rebukes the theorists who see Keynesianism as an obvious way out (Krugman et al.) and looks for ways out of the mess that it in itself an integral product of the grotesque system of financial capitalism.4/5 stars on the basis that a) the translation could better, as above, and b) Marazzi is still better elsewhere (see Capital and Affects). That being said, as a worthy addition to Semiotext(e)'s fantastic Intervention series, it more than holds its weight.

Just what I wanted