File:Marx, Money and Capital. An Interview with Lapo Berti.pdf

Paolo Davoli, Letizia Rustichelli :: Marx, Money and Capital. An Interview with Lapo Berti.

Monetary research has represented in many diffe-rent ways a common ground for many French Rhizospheric intellectuals throughout the 60s and 70s. They conceived money as the core instrument employed by advanced capitalist market economies to trigger the rapid and profound transformation which turned the Fordist industrial system into a new hi-tech financial global and delocalized form of production. The French Rhizosphere was not only able to understand the mutation of economic paradigm while this was still in progress, but it also conducted original and persuasive analyses of money starting from its early invention in Anatolia in the VIII century B.C. and in Ancient Greece in the VII and VI century B.C. Hence, according to Rhizospheric thinkers, money is the chief accelerationist device deployed in the context «rapid domination» strategies conducted by modern global and financial market economies. The reason of this interview lies here: Lapo Berti has been a leading figure in the context of Italian post-workerist monetary research. Thus, he experienced as an insider the movements, the crisis of Marxism in the 60s and 70s, as well as the lack wi-thin the Communist and Marxist cultural context of adequate analyses and agendas on “money”, and finally he lived through the years of monetarism.For the purpose of our research on the birth of «Rhizonomics», it is important to reconstruct the cultural common ground – i.e. historical, economic, philosophical and political – of the 60s and 70s, which hosted the development of that critique of money, in its forms and functions, which marked the work of Michel Foucault (The Order of Things, The Will to Knowledge), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (The Anti-Œdipus) and Pierre Klossowski (Living Currency).