Stefano Harney, Fred Moten: The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013–) [EN, DE, ES, FR]

“In this series of essays Fred Moten and Stefano Harney draw on the theory and practice of the black radical tradition as it supports, inspires, and extends contemporary social and political thought and aesthetic critique. Today the general wealth of social life finds itself confronted by mutations in the mechanisms of control: the proliferation of capitalist logistics, governance by credit, and the management of pedagogy. Working from and within the social poesis of life in the undercommons Moten and Harney develop and expand an array of concepts: study, debt, surround, planning, and the shipped. On the fugitive path of an historical and global blackness, the essays in this volume unsettle and invite the reader to the self-organised ensembles of social life that are launched every day and every night amid the general antagonism of the undercommons.”

Introduction by Jack Halberstam
Publisher Minor Compositions, Wivenhoe, 2013
Open access
ISBN 9781570272677, 1570272670
165 pages

Reviews: onderwijs filosofie (2015, NL), Kris Cohen (open set, 2016), Lisa M. Corrigan (Philosophy & Rhetoric, 2019).
Commentary: David Wallace (New Yorker, 2018).
Interviews with authors: Transversal (2016, EN/DE), Cristina Rivera Garza, Marta Malo, and Juan Pablo Anaya (New Inquiry, 2018), Millenials Are Killing Capitalism (2020, podcast, part 2).

Publisher (EN)
Publisher (DE)
Publisher (ES)
WorldCat (EN)

The Undercommons (English, 2013, PDF)
Die Undercommons (German, trans. Birgit Mennel und Gerald Raunig, 2016, EPUB)
Los Abajocomunes: planear fugitivo y estudio negro (Spanish, trans. Cristina Rivera Garza, Marta Malo and Juan Pablo Anaya, Cooperativa Cráter Invertido and La Campechana Mental, 2017, EPUB) (added on 2019-6-5)
Les sous-communs (French, 2022, added on 2022-1-11)

Maurizio Lazzarato: The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition (2011–) [French, English]

“‘Debt—both public debt and private debt—has become a major concern of economic and political leaders. In The Making of the Indebted Man, Maurizio Lazzarato shows that, far from being a threat to the capitalist economy, debt lies at the very core of the neoliberal project. Through a reading of Karl Marx’s lesser-known youthful writings on John Mill, and a rereading of writings by Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault, Lazzarato demonstrates that debt is above all a political construction, and that the creditor/debtor relation is the fundamental social relation of Western societies.

Debt cannot be reduced to a simple economic mechanism, for it is also a technique of “public safety” through which individual and collective subjectivities are governed and controlled. Its aim is to minimize the uncertainty of the time and behavior of the governed. We are forever sinking further into debt to the State, to private insurance, and, on a more general level, to corporations. To insure that we honor our debts, we are at once encouraged and compelled to become the “entrepreneurs” of our lives, of our “human capital.” In this way, our entire material, psychological, and affective horizon is upended and reconfigured.

How do we extricate ourselves from this impossible situation? How do we escape the neoliberal condition of the indebted man? Lazzarato argues that we will have to recognize that there is no simple technical, economic, or financial solution. We must instead radically challenge the fundamental social relation structuring capitalism: the system of debt.”

French edition
Publisher Éditions Amsterdam, 2011
125 pages

English edition
Translated by Joshua David Jordan
Publisher Semiotext(e), 2012
Intervention series, 13
ISBN 1584351152, 9781584351153
199 pages

Review: Nikolay Karkov (Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy, 2012).

Publisher (EN)

La Fabrique de l’homme endetté. Essai sur la condition néolibérale (French, 2011, updated on 2016-12-23)
The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition (English, 2012, updated on 2017-6-26)

Occupy Wall Street/Strike Debt: The Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual (2012)

This manual—written by an anonymous collective of resistors, defaulters, and allies from Strike Debt and Occupy Wall Street—aims to provide specific tactics for understanding and fighting against the debt system. You’ll find detailed strategies and resources for dealing with credit card, medical, student, housing and municipal debt, tactics for navigating the pitfalls of personal bankruptcy, and information to help protect yourself from predatory lenders. Recognizing that individually we can only do so much to resist the system of debt, the manual also introduces ideas for those who have made the decision to take collective action.

Published in September 2012
Produced as a collaboration between Members of the Strike Debt assembly, Occupy Wall Street, Common Notions, Antumbra Design
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
132 pages

authors

PDF