ABSTRACT
When one views the whole panorama of the Italian postworkerist tradition, Paolo Virno in many ways stands out as a double exception. On the one hand, throughout his whole life he remained one of the closest and most faithful partisans of this theoretical and political tradition (an example of this is his stubborn attachment to thinking the category of the multitude even in his most recent works, despite the relative decline in usage witnessed by the term after its heyday in the early 2000s). On the other hand, within this tradition he is probably the member who is the most unscrupulous about inserting non-orthodox references, to the point that in his latest books his references include Wittgenstein, Vygotsky, Gehlen, Plessner, Benveniste, and even Vittorio Gallese and contemporary cognitivism, all revisited in a coherent and highly individual fashion. Paolo Virno is at the same time an undoubtedly symptomatic representative of Italian postworkerism (with all the defining elements pertaining to it), and a highly original thinker who does not resemble anyone else from his generation or from the tradition of thought to which he belongs. In terms of originality, something similar could be said of Christian Marazzi: among Italian postworkerist thinkers, he has been par excellence the one who has devoted all his efforts to a serious and even sometimes technical analysis of the different economic and financial cycles of the last two decades. Marazzi’s seminal and deeply innovative book Il posto dei calzini [The Place of Socks] published in Switzerland in 1994 (he is from the Italian-Swiss region of Ticino) probably constitutes the inaugural breakthrough moment for the analysis of the contemporary form of post-Fordist labor and the current process of production. Marazzi is the only true economist among the postworkerists, a tradition whose theoretical efforts, at least in the last twenty years, have almost always been confined to disciplines such as philosophy or sociology. This is not an insignificant consideration for a theoretical and political position that still openly refers to Karl Marx. It is also important to note that in the last few years, and especially since the dot-com bubble, Christian Marazzi’s work has been increasingly focused on the study of financial processes and especially on the role that linguistic practices play in them. Language is already considered to be a crucial economic factor in any sociology of labor study that analyzes the changes in the organization of production since the so-called post-Fordist turn in the 1980s. But the way language also deeply affects the realm of finance has somehow remained under-theorized. Marazzi has developed an analytical framework that decisively underlines the increasingly crucial role played by financial capital in contemporary forms of accumulation, but, even more importantly, as a consequence of that, he has been able to stress how the contemporary extraction of value based on financialization relies on the valorization of the common (and mainly linguistic and relational) features that define all speaking beings.
