Silvio Lorusso: Entreprecariat: Everyone Is an Entrepreneur Nobody Is Safe (2018–) [IT, EN]

“Entrepreneur or precarious worker? These are the terms of a cognitive dissonance that turns everyone’s life into a shaky project in perennial start-up phase. Silvio Lorusso guides us through the entreprecariat, a world where change is natural and healthy, whatever it may bring. A world populated by motivational posters, productivity tools, mobile offices and self-help techniques. A world in which a mix of entrepreneurial ideology and widespread precarity is what regulates professional social media, online marketplaces for self-employment and crowdfunding platforms for personal needs. The result? A life in permanent beta, with sometimes tragic implications.”

Italian edition
With a foreword by Geert Lovink and an afterword by Raffaele Alberto Ventura
Publisher Krisis Publishing, Brescia, 2018
ISBN 9788894402902, 8894402908
223 pages

English edition
Translated by Isobel Butters
Publisher Onomatopee, Eindhoven, 2019
Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 License
ISBN 9789493148161, 9493148165
257 pages

Interviews with author: Walter Marocchi (2019), Floor van Luijk (Metropolis M, 2020).
Reviews: Marco Petroni (Artribune, 2019), Tiziano Bonini (cheFare, 2019), Sandro Moiso (Carmilla, 2019), Giulio Gonella (Volume, 2020), Alessandro Ludovico (Neural, 2020).
Commentary: Nicola Bozzi (Digimag, 2017, EN).

Author
Publisher (IT)
Publisher (EN)
WorldCat (IT)
WorldCat (EN)

Entreprecariat – Siamo tutti imprenditori. Nessuno è al sicuro (Italian, 2018, 9 MB)
Entreprecariat: Everyone Is an Entrepreneur Nobody Is Safe (English, trans. Isobel Butters, 2019, 7 MB, added on 2020-5-12)

Alex Foti: General Theory of the Precariat: Great Recession, Revolution, Reaction (2017)

“From the fast-food industry to the sharing economy, precarious work has become the norm in contemporary capitalism, like the anti-globalization movement predicted it would. This book describes how the precariat came into being under neoliberalism and how it has radicalized in response to crisis and austerity. It investigates the political economy of precarity and the historical sociology of the precariat, and discusses movements of precarious youth against oligopoly and oligarchy in Europe, America, and East Asia. Foti covers the three fundamental dates of recent history: the financial crisis of 2008, the political revolutions of 2011, and the national-populist backlash of 2016, to present his class theory of the precariat and the ideology of left-populist movements. Building a theory of capitalist crisis to understand the aftermath of the Great Recession, he outlines political scenarios where the precariat can successfully fight for emancipation, and reverse inequality and environmental destruction. Written by the activist who put precarity on the map of radical thinking, this is the first work proposing a complete theory of the precariat in its actuality and potentiality.”

Publisher Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2017
Theory on Demand series, 25
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 International
ISBN 9789492302182
155 pages

Publisher

PDF, PDF
EPUB, EPUB
Issuu

Gerald Raunig: A Thousand Machines: A Concise Philosophy of the Machine as Social Movement (2008–) [Spanish, English]

“In this “concise philosophy of the machine,” Gerald Raunig provides a historical and critical backdrop to a concept proposed forty years ago by the French philosophers Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze: the machine, not as a technical device and apparatus, but as a social composition and concatenation. This conception of the machine as an arrangement of technical, bodily, intellectual, and social components subverts the opposition between man and machine, organism and mechanism, individual and community. Drawing from an unusual range of films, literature, and performance—from the role of bicycles in Flann O’Brien’s fiction to Vittorio de Sica’s Neorealist film The Bicycle Thieves, and from Karl Marx’s “Fragment on Machines” to the deus ex machina of Greek drama—Raunig arrives at an enhanced conception of the machine as a social movement, finding its most apt and concrete manifestation in the Euromayday movement, which since 2001 has become a transnational activist and discursive practice focused upon the precarious nature of labor and lives.”

First published in German as Tausend Maschinen. Eine kleine Philosophie der Maschine als sozialer Bewegung, Turia + Kant, Vienna, 2008.

English edition
Translated by Aileen Derieg
Publisher Semiotext(e), 2010
Intervention series, 5
ISBN 1584350857, 9781584350859
128 pages

Reviews

Publisher (EN)

Mil máquinas. breve filosofía de las máquinas como movimiento social (Spanish, trans. Marcelo Expósito, 2008, added 2014-3-16)
A Thousand Machines: A Concise Philosophy of the Machine as Social Movement (English, trans. Aileen Derieg, 2010, 19 MB, updated on 2017-6-26)