Take a first look at the recently released Willing Slaves of Capital

Released earlier this June, Frédéric Lordon's Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire explores the difficult conclusions to the seemingly simple question: Why do people work for other people? If you haven't yet read the book, you can now start to read Lordon's compelling answers to these questions. Critical Theory has posted an excerpt from the first chapter, which serves as an intriguing entry point to Lordon's theory of money and currency.




The excerpt begins:

It is true that of all the desires it harnesses, capitalism begins with money—or rather with bare life, life in need of reproduction. For, in a decentralised economy with a division of labour, material reproduction passes through the gateway of money. This mediation is not purely a capitalist invention: the division of labour, and the monetary market exchange that accompanies it as it deepens beyond a certain threshold, have developed slowly over centuries.  

This is just the beginning to Lordon's bold book, which uses the author's in-depth analyses of Marx and Spinoza to call for a rethinking of capitalism and its transcendence on the basis of the contemporary experience of work.

Visit Critical Theory to read the full excerpt.