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skttrbrn's review
3.0
This was mostly pretty good, and makes for a good bridge between Four Futures/Fully Automated Luxury Communism and Postcapitalist Desire. Berardi's writing is mostly accessible, if repetitive at times (a further edit could possibly have trimmed 30 pages off the pagecount) as he oscillates between general inferences from politics and history to deeper theoretical matters. It's here, when sinking his teeth into concepts, that he's at his best.
In the final stages of the book Berardi disavows the power of the Left as a political project and it's here that he reveals a significant weakness in his argument: he supposes that capitalism can be voluntarily reformed with the interests of the world population in mind without suggesting any way of tackling issues such as social atomisation or even so much as addressing the prevailing miasma of right-wing ideology that clouds the horizon of possibility. And so, as a staunch leftist, I have to fundamentally disagree with some of the conclusions that he makes, such as that it will be the role of a collectivised cognitive workforce to take us beyond our present stagnation in late capitalism. Instead, I take the stance of Mark Fisher as expressed in Postcapitalist Desire, in maintaining that it is the proletariat that contains revolutionary power on account of its structural position, rather than any positive attributes it may hold as a class.
In the final stages of the book Berardi disavows the power of the Left as a political project and it's here that he reveals a significant weakness in his argument: he supposes that capitalism can be voluntarily reformed with the interests of the world population in mind without suggesting any way of tackling issues such as social atomisation or even so much as addressing the prevailing miasma of right-wing ideology that clouds the horizon of possibility. And so, as a staunch leftist, I have to fundamentally disagree with some of the conclusions that he makes, such as that it will be the role of a collectivised cognitive workforce to take us beyond our present stagnation in late capitalism. Instead, I take the stance of Mark Fisher as expressed in Postcapitalist Desire, in maintaining that it is the proletariat that contains revolutionary power on account of its structural position, rather than any positive attributes it may hold as a class.
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