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hieronymusbotched's review against another edition
4.0
An important topic and an, at times, oddly casual discussion of such an extremely somber topic. Byung-chul Han‘s Psychopolitics might be a better primer for the kind of hyper-alienation he gets to discussing, but there‘s a lot here worth mulling over.
So maybe not the best book it could have been, but well worth a read for someone who‘s already taken more than a fleeting glance at the subject.
So maybe not the best book it could have been, but well worth a read for someone who‘s already taken more than a fleeting glance at the subject.
vdege's review against another edition
4.0
A bit polemic w/some convoluted language at points but definitely has compelling arguments, very enjoyable
frogwithlittlehammer's review against another edition
dark
4.0
Chaotic terror pornography I don’t want to talk about it but it was pretty indulgent. In a goes-down-easy-hard-to-swallow kind of way.
brainofj72's review against another edition
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
daisydostoevsky's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
5.0
Okay. When I downloaded this for free from Verso I did not read the author description at all and that’s the story of how I accidentally encountered Autonomist Marxism for the first time. I am not opposed to it at all. I am shocked, however, to learn that this philosophy arose in the 60s, yet it has never been so suitably appropriate than it is today.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am writing to you from the age of generative AI, when Berardi’s “cognitive workers” (myself included) have never been so concerned by the so-called “spasm” i.e. the accelerated expansion of the infosphere and simultaneous shrinking of our physical spaces and resources.
As a millennial, I don’t think I’ve ever read such an accurate and holistic explanation of all the hoplessness, despair, loneliness, alienation, and anger that I have been holding inside of me for 20 years as a result of having to grow up in this era of spasm (and it’s embarrassing to hear it from a 73-year-old man).
I think that Berardi did a good job in articulating the kind of theoretical and practical avenues that could be considered for Marxist action in today’s age, and what’s even better — and by the way, this is what made me wonder in the first place, “What? Is this Marxist?” — is that it does not end in a depressing note. Granted, you had to wade through 99% of this book having to hear about all manner of atrocity (but that’s just classic Marxist nonfiction), Berardi actually concludes with some advice you would maybe expect from a self-help book, but certainly not from a book on radical political philosophy:
“Remember that despair and joy are not incompatible. […] [D]o not be frightened by despair. It does not delimit the potential for joy. And joy is a condition for proving intellectual despair wrong.”
(Then, in true skeptic fashion, he ends with this last piece of advice: “don’t believe (me).” What a fucking rockstar.)
He reminds me so much of Mark Fisher, who also wrote about the intersection of capitalist realism and mental health, and whose advice for coping with the seemingly hopeless state of things is to have both “pessimism of the emotions [and] optimism of the act.”