How capitalism forms our lives

Abstract

The idea that capitalism is more than an economic system and a ‘definite mode of life’ that shapes our relationships with others, our sense of ourselves and our capacities, practices, and actions in material world, should be rather obvious. While contributions in this book vary in their focus and align with different theoretical approaches and methodologies, all provide meditations on scope, contours, and content of capitalism as a form of life. The premise the authors implicitly share is that by redefining capitalism as form of life, it can be analyzed as social practice, rather than as system radically distinct from cultural, social, political or even biological. For Giorgio Agamben, a form of life cannot, by definition, be capitalist, since capitalism smothers possibility of all life. Timothée Haug deploys the metaphor of metabolic processes to revisit Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism as both a mode of production and a form of life, drawing on feminist and ecological criticism.