The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present - Tapa dura

"Jason Read's book contains the most original and incisive readings of Marx's texts that I have read in years, along with equally penetrating analyses of Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari. He demonstrates beautifully along the way that French poststructuralism is not opposed to Marxism, but that the two are in fact intimately related in their theories of the production of subjectivity. The book helps reorient our understandings of both Marxism and poststructuralism."

"This book represents a thoughtful reconsideration of Marx's notion of the mode of production and does so in a way that is likely to appeal to a new and younger readership by showing that mode of production is not simply an economic concept but one that can explain the forms of subjectivity peculiar to different kinds of social organization. The theoretical framework of the book is refreshingly broad; the author draws from a number of theoretical and philosophical schools and cannot easily be categorized as 'Deleuzean' or 'Althusserian.' This represents the perspective of a generation no longer constrained by the notion of opposing theoretical camps so prevalent in the 1980s and 90s."

What is the relation between the economy, or the mode of production, and culture, beliefs, and desires? How is it possible to think of these relations without reducing one to the other, or effacing one for the sake of the other? To answer these questions, The Micro-Politics of Capital re-reads Marx in light of the contemporary critical interrogations of subjectivity in the works of Althusser, Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, and Negri. Jason Read suggests that what characterizes contemporary capitalism is the intimate intersection of the production of commodities with the production of desire, beliefs, and knowledge.