Reviews for The beginning of history

The average rating for The beginning of history based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-02-02 00:00:00 Van Hartman This book is awesome. De Angelis comes out of the same grand tradition as famous Italian autonomists like Negri, Lazzarato, Virno, etc, but where the latter all seem to have sunk into a common obsession with the notion of "real subsumption", that there is nothing and noplace outside of capitalism, De Angelis argues exactly the opposite. In fact, he insists that it would be better not even to talk about "capitalism" as a total system (as opposed to as an ideology - as an ideology it obviously does exist), but rather, to talk about capital, and capitalists, and capitalist value practices (using money to make more money), but that these capitalist value practices are never the only game in town. There are always other ones. True, the capitalist ones are dominant at the moment, but there is a continual struggle going on, where on the one hand, the market sets everyone against each other, sets the livelihood of people in Africa against those in Germany, of one city, town, enterprise, community, occupation against another, so that even every invention or discovery that was originally intended to eliminate scarcity and improve people's lives ultimately gets diverted to the purpose of creating new forms of scarcity and keeping people in desperate competition against each other. In reaction, those motivated by other values (solidarity, community, ecology, beauty, security, tradition...) are constantly creating new forms of commons, of shared and collectively managed resources, and political forces aligned with capitalism are always attempting to break them up and appropriate them with new enclosures. Thus, what Marx called "primitive accumulation" has never ended. At the same time, the capitalists are always trying to create "commons" of their own, what they like to call "externalities", fobbing off the costs of production onto other people, communities, or nature. Much of the political struggle of the last twenty or thirty years, De Angelis explains, can be understood precisely as battles over the creation and enclosure of different sorts of commons, and behind it all, lie battles over the nature of value itself. This book is a brilliant antidote for the stylish despair that has overtaken so much of the autonomous Left in recent years - that has sent figures like Yann Moulier and even, to some degree, Hardt and Negri to the point of throwing themselves as the feet of their former enemies once their prophecies of the rising of the Multitude did nt seem to be becoming immediately true. While sometimes technical, it is always engaging, passionate, and often, inspiring.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-07-31 00:00:00 Lauren Mccormick Not bad. I have some major theoretical issues with him (and in his critiques of tony Negri, I side with Negri), still some nice contributions. Some strange use of vocabulary...some ridiculous figures which were unnecessary, but confusing to follow. Some very selective citations from Marx. He seems also to think he has discovered several things that were previously "discovered" by other autonomous Marxists. Still, worth a read.