Framed by brilliant readings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Gabriel Tarde, and Mikhail Bakhtin, Maurizio Lazzarato’s Revolutions of Capitalism charts a new theory of contemporary capitalism and the politics against it. Originally published in French in 2004, this newly translated work sees capitalism as driven, not only by labor or value, but by the capture of cooperation and by the taming of possibles. Lazzarato theorizes how contemporary capitalism depends on noo-politics, or the “action of brains at a distance on other brains,” which seeks to control memory and attention and to trap the proliferation of possibles. Against this, Lazzarato reveals how current social movements attack established institutions and their vision of a single possible world to liberate the creation and actualization of a multiplicity of possible worlds.

Maurizio Lazzarato is an Italian sociologist and philosopher, residing in Paris, France.

Brian Whitener is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University at Buffalo.

Geo Maher is an abolitionist educator, organizer, and writer based in Philadelphia.

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction / Brian Whitener  1
1. The Event and Politics  5
2. The Concepts of Life and the Living of Societies of Control  33
3. The Corporation and Neomonadology  53
4. Expression Versus Communication  85
5. Resistance and Creation in Postsocialist Movements  111
Notes  147
Bibliography  155
Index  159