Interview with CHRISTIAN MARAZZI by IDA DOMINIJANNI
Mission impossible: saving the Euro, the landslide of de-Europeanization and the geopolitical cataclysm that can come from it. But the crisis can’t be resolved through austerity, only recession and depression are produced. An interview with Christian Marazzi on penitence after the neoliberal binge and the antidote of the common.
Economist, professor at universities in Switzerland, Padua, New York and Geneva and a highly regarded activist and intellectual of radical leftist movements, Christian Marazzi is one of the most lucid analysts of the current economic-financial crisis. Among the first to diagnose its historic character and global impact in 2009 when the crisis exploded in the U.S., he predicted the Eurozone’s inevitable involvement. Astute analyst of financialization as postfordist biocapitalism’s modus operandi, he doesn’t believe in the possibility of overcoming the crisis or containing its contradictions through economically rigorous policies. We begin with the rescuing the Euro to think about what is down the road ahead.
[Nina] Power repeats Badiou’s argument that such “liberation” of women is better understood as “a generalized imperative that all femininity be translatable into the logic of the market.” Laws banning the wearing of the hijab in public demand that women’s bodies visibly circulate in society, a demand Power later returns to when discussing pornography. Perhaps the most groundbreaking section of Power’s book focuses on women and work. Power admits, “Of course, women have always worked, that is to say, raised children, tended to the home, grown crops, etc.” As they have moved into the workforce in greater numbers, women have undeniably succeeded on a number of levels. But Power argues, “The job market continues to differentiate between men and women – the most blatant is the surprisingly resilient pay differential for the same jobs, and the predominance of women in part-time and badly-paid work.” Women have especially found themselves forced into post-Fordist forms of work that rely on flexible, precarious, and ultimately disposable sources of labor. In fact, temp agencies depend on the supply of women workers, and the “feminization of labor” is progressively making these work conditions general for both women and men. Despite the harsh realities of most work in the post-Fordist era, “images of a certain kind of successful woman proliferate – the city worker in heels, the flexible agency employee, the hard-working hedonist who can afford to spend her income on vibrators and wine – and would have us believe that – yes – capitalism is a girl’s best friend.
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