George Caffentzis (born 1945) is an American political philosopher and autonomist Marxist. His work has addressed the philosophy of money, Marxist value theory, work and technology, energy, social reproduction, the commons, and political movements. He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Southern Maine, where he taught for more than thirty years.
Caffentzis was a member of the editorial collective of the autonomist Marxist journal Zerowork in the 1970s and a co-founder of the Midnight Notes Collective, which from 1979 published analyses of energy, class composition, war, globalization, technology and enclosure. He was also a co-founder and coordinator of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa (CAFA), established in 1991 to document and support struggles over structural adjustment and higher education in Africa.
Early life and education Caffentzis was born in 1945 to Greek immigrant parents and grew up in New York. He studied philosophy and physics at Antioch College between 1962 and 1965, where he participated in civil-rights activism and campaigns concerning Cuba, before completing an undergraduate degree in philosophy at the City College of New York in 1968. He subsequently studied philosophy at Princeton University, receiving his PhD in 1978. His dissertation, Does Quantum Mechanics Necessitate a Theoretical Revolution in Logic?, examined questions in the philosophy and logic of quantum mechanics.
Political activity and Midnight Notes During the 1970s Caffentzis became involved in autonomist Marxist debates around work, class composition and the political significance of unwaged labour. He was part of the editorial collective that produced the first issue of Zerowork in 1975, alongside writers including Harry Cleaver and Peter Linebaugh. In the same period, Caffentzis, Monty Neill and John Willshire-Carrera anonymously wrote the pamphlet Wages for Students (1975). Influenced by the Wages for Housework campaign, it treated education as a form of unwaged work and argued for understanding student struggles within a broader analysis of capitalist labour and social reproduction. The authorship was publicly identified when a new edition of the pamphlet was published in 2016.
Following disagreements within Zerowork, Caffentzis began assembling the group that became the Midnight Notes Collective in 1977; the collective held its first meeting in 1978 and published its first issue in 1979. Its early work addressed the anti-nuclear movement and the relationship between energy, work and capitalist accumulation. Later issues examined technological change, war, international debt and globalization. The collective's 1990 issue The New Enclosures argued that enclosure and primitive accumulation should not be understood simply as processes belonging to the origins of capitalism, but as recurrent features of capitalist development. This analysis subsequently became influential in discussions of neoliberalism and the contemporary commons. Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, 1973–1992, published by Autonomedia in 1992, collected work from the first decade of the project.
Africa and academic freedom Caffentzis and his partner Silvia Federici lived for a period in Nigeria during the 1980s. Their experience of the effects of international debt and structural adjustment on African universities became an important focus of their subsequent political and intellectual work. In 1991, Caffentzis and Federici helped establish the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, later working with scholars including Ousseina Alidou. CAFA documented student and faculty struggles against policies promoted by the World Bank and other international financial institutions, including the introduction of tuition fees, reductions in student housing and food subsidies, and other changes to public higher education. Caffentzis, Federici and Alidou subsequently edited A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities (2000), which combined theoretical analyses with accounts of student and academic resistance to structural adjustment across the continent.
Philosophical work A major strand of Caffentzis's academic work concerns the relationship between philosophy, money and the historical development of capitalism. His studies of John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume examine monetary theory not simply as an abstract branch of philosophy but in relation to contemporary political conflicts over work, property, class discipline and capitalist development. Clipped Coins, Abused Words and Civil Government: John Locke's Philosophy of Money (1989) examines Locke's involvement in the English monetary controversies surrounding the Great Recoinage of 1696. Caffentzis connects Locke's arguments about money to his theories of property, language and government and to the emergence of capitalist labour discipline.
His Exciting the Industry of Mankind: George Berkeley's Philosophy of Money (2000) examines Berkeley's monetary thought in the context of eighteenth-century Ireland. A review in History of Political Economy noted the book's attempt to situate Berkeley's economic ideas within their wider philosophical and social context. Caffentzis returned to these questions in Civilizing Money: Hume, His Monetary Project, and the Scottish Enlightenment (2021), which interprets Hume's philosophy of money in relation to projects for restructuring the Scottish Highlands and incorporating populations into market and wage relations. Historian Carl Wennerlind has described the Locke, Berkeley and Hume studies as a trilogy on early modern philosophies of money, distinguishing Caffentzis's approach by its emphasis on the specific political and class conflicts to which monetary theories responded.
Work, technology and the commons A second strand of Caffentzis's writing applies Marxist theories of value and class struggle to technological change. His work has examined the relationship between Marxist value theory, energy systems, heat engines, computers and Turing machines. Essays written from the 1970s onward were collected in In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and the Crisis of Capitalism (2013), which addresses automation, energy, information technology, value theory and capitalist conceptions of the "end of work". Caffentzis has also written extensively about the commons and contemporary forms of enclosure, frequently in collaboration and dialogue with Federici. Their work treats commoning as a set of social relations and practices rather than solely as the management of commonly owned resources. A 2020 review by the London School of Economics identified value, social reproduction and the commons as central themes in their joint intellectual and political work.
Personal life Caffentzis's long-term partner is feminist scholar and activist Silvia Federici. The two have collaborated on political and intellectual projects including Midnight Notes, the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa and work on enclosure and the commons.
Books Parole abusate, monete tosate e governo civile. La filosofia del denaro di John Locke, Istituto dell' Enciclopedia Italiana fondata da Giovanni Treccani, Rome, Italy, 1988. Clipped Coins, Abused Words and Civil Government: John Locke's Philosophy of Money (New York: Autonomedia/ Semiotext(e) Press, 1989). Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, 1973–1992, (New York: Autonomedia, 1992) (co-edited). A chapter from Midnight Oil, "Introduction to The New Enclosures," was reprinted in David Solnit (ed.), Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2004), pp. 61–72. A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities, (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000) (co-edited). Exciting the Industry of Mankind: George Berkeley's Philosophy of Money (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000). Auroras of the Zapatistas: Local and Global Struggles in the Fourth World War, (New York: Autonomedia, 2001) (co-edited). In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and Value, (Oakland: PM Press, 2013).
References
External links
Midnight Notes Collective George Caffentzis' page at the University of Southern Maine George Caffenzis page at LibCom Tribute to George Caffentzis in The Commoner Review of 'A Thousand Flowers – Social Struggles against Structural Adjustment in African Universities' by Refilwe Senatla and Fazel Khan