Capital Hates Everyone: Fascism or Revolution

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Why we must reject the illusory consolations of technology and choose revolution over fascism.

We are living in apocalyptic times. In Capital Hates Everyone, famed sociologist Maurice Lazzarato points to a stark choice emerging from the magma of today's world events: fascism or revolution. Fascism now drives the course of democracies as they grow less and less liberal and increasingly subject to the law of capital. Since the 1970s, Lazzarato writes, capital has entered a logic of war. It has become, by the power conferred on it by financialization, a political force intent on destruction. Lazzarato urges us to reject the illusory consolations of a technology-abetted “new” kind of capitalism and choose revolution over fascism.

This offensive was made possible by the cycle of revolutions coming to an end. But while it was unfolding, critical thinking announced the suppression of social relations and the advent of a new capitalism, a milder one, more attentive to the comfort of workers. Today, the prophets of technology even boast of a solution to the climate crisis or an exit from capitalism by the very means of capital. In the face of these illusory consolations and the growing threat of fascism, Lazzarato argues it is urgent that we rediscover the meaning of strategic confrontations and the means of rebuilding a revolutionary war machine. Since capital hates everyone, everyone must hate capital.