War and Violence

It is not sufficient to speak of violence alone: sexual violence, racial violence, the violence of exploitation. In capitalism – Maurizio Lazzarato writes – production, whether material or immaterial, affective or desiring, always presupposes the extra-economic, extra-affective, extra-cognitive production of social classes. For production, there must be class; and to produce class, there must be a war of subjugation. For a long time, war no longer seemed to be part of political debates – it seemed merely a phenomenon from the past or the fate of distant countries on the planet. In his essay War and Violence post-operaist philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato talks about the permanent continuity of warlike violence, its relation to the beginning of capitalist cycles of accumulation, and the production of subjectivity.