This book pays homage to a rock band that has most influenced alternative culture, the Grateful Dead. It critically discussing the evolution of the libertarian spirit in the USA, which was born and developed in the 1960s and merged in the last three decades into a libertarian ideology, based on individual freedom, antistatalism and the primacy of the spirit of the self-made man. Examining how this transition was functional, on the one hand, to high-tech digital innovation and, on the other, to the spirit of new platform capitalism. Andrea Fumagalli suggests that the process of capturing the libertarian spirit for capitalist purposes, which represents one of the clearest examples of "life subsumption", the acknowledgment that the life of individuals at the very moment that it triggers processes of social cooperation is a potential source of subversive behaviour, and how this can turn into a powerful tool for today's capitalist valorisation.
Andrea Fumagalli is an activist and Professor of Economics and History of Economic Thought in the Department of Economics and Management at University of Pavia, Italy. He also teaches Eco-Social Economics at the Free University of Bolzano, Italy. He is the co-author of The Crisis of the Global Economy with Sandro Mezzadra (2010) and Cognitive Capitalism, Welfare and Labour (2019) with Alfonso Giuliani, Stefano Lucarelli, Carlo Vercellone.
AcknowledgementsPreface to the English editionChapter 1: Counterculture and Cyberculture: the 1960s vs 1990sChapter 2: The Music of the Grateful DeadChapter 3: Exodus, Community Spirit and the CommonsChapter 4: Open Source, Hacker Spirit, Proprietary Individualism, and Anarcho-CapitalismChapter 5: The Money of the Commonwealth and the Financial CountercultureChapter 6: Desiring Subjectivities and Californian Ideology: Towards a new form of subsumption? List of Grateful Dead’s Live concertsBibliography
'Financial Psychedelia and the Commons' is an exceptionally innovative book in the field of social sciences. Andrea Fumagalli places the reader amidst counterculture and cyberculture, evoking the spirit of Grateful Dead’s music and contemporary blows against the Empire that denounce capitalism for exploiting commons through its financial infrastructure.