This book explores two themes in connection with contemporary capitalism: infrastructures capitalism as the most advanced phase of a modernity, of which the ‘workman’ or homo faber is the embodiment, who exists within an infrastructure whose logic of connectivity is aimed at value extraction; and a landscape of ruins – in the form of symbolic misery, the Anthropocene and a process of refeudalisation – that the homo faber has been piling up around himself as a result. In response to this dynamic, the author elaborates a social, cultural and political project – a ‘design hope’ of both material and immaterial dimensions – that adopts the perspective of possibilism: an outlook that eschews ever greater social and environmental costs in the name of future ‘development’, but seeks a logic of reproduction based on a real politics of care in the form of generalised social action. Possibilism and the Ruins of Capitalism will therefore appeal to scholars of social and political theory with interests in critiques of capitalism and alternative futures.
This book explores the logic of value extraction that characterises infrastructures capitalism as the most advanced phase of a modernity and the ruin that it has piled up, and argues instead for a logic of reproduction based on a real politics of care in the form of generalised social action.
Introduction
1. Capitalism and infrastructures: A history of continuities and
discontinuities
2. Between Globe and Planet: Renewing Kulturkritik in the ruins of
capitalism
3. Possibilism: Searching for a logic of reproduction, beyond homo faber
(Instead of) conclusions
Vando Borghi is Full Professor of Sociology of Economic Processes, Work and Organization at the University of Bologna, Italy. He is the co-editor of the Research Handbook on Public Sociology and Workers and the Global Informal Economy.
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