At the Edge of Everything: Collected Poems

George Caffentzis

A collection of poems spanning six decades of life, love, loss, and rebellion amidst the planetary transformations of the working class and capital, from the acclaimed Marxist philosopher and writer George Caffentzis.

"I have never considered myself a poet, yet, from my adolescence, poetry has been a constant company in my life. Only recently, however, I have begun to collect poems that I had scattered through notebooks, back-pages of articles and other occasional spaces. The desire to see them as one work is partly stimulated by the recognition of recurring themes, at times in syntony with those inspiring my political writings. Among them are the memories and the nostalgia for the Greek world of my childhood, my grandmother's house facing the Taygetus mountain, the pleasures and troubles of love and political organizing, and, with the passing of years, the mourning of dead friends and comrades, and above all the never-ending pleasure of playing with words. This book collects some of the poems that have accompanied this journey." —George Caffentzis, from the Introduction 

Praise

George Caffentzis has been the philosopher of the anti-capitalist movement from the American civil rights movement of the 1960s to the European autonomists of the 1970s, from the Nigerian workers of the oil boom of the 1980s to the encuentros of the Zapatistas in the 1990s, from the feminists of wages-for-housework to the struggle of the precariat for the commons. Trained as both an economist and a physicist he has taken fundamental categories such as money, time, work, energy, and value and re-thought them in relation to both revolutionary Marxism and to the dynamics of our changing movement.

An historian of our own times he carries the political wisdom of the 20th into the 21st century. He is a lively and dogged polemicist; he dances circles around the pompous marxologist; with the passing of time his thought has grown in depth and increasingly tends to be expressed with pleasure and humor. The lever by which he overturns the world is light as a feather, and its fulcrum is as down to earth as the housewife, the student, the peasant, the worker. Here is capitalist critique and proletarian reasoning fit for our time.

—Peter Linebaugh, author of The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

George Caffentzis is an activist and Marxist scholar from Brooklyn, New York. His life has been devoted to analyzing and confronting the mechanisms of capital, from the anti-nuclear movement in the 1970s, student struggles in Nigeria in the 1980s, to the Zapatistas in Mexico in the 1990s, to the streets of Manhattan and the Occupy movement in the 2000s, and beyond. Caffentzis’ work on the philosophy of money, the IMF and the World Bank, machines, work, and the ever-present energy crisis, was solidified as a founding member of the Midnight Notes Collective and continued in his books In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and the Crisis of Capitalism and No Blood for Oil: Essays on Energy, Class Struggle and War, among others. He is also the author of an academic trilogy on the philosophies of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. At the Edge of Everything is his first published book of poems spanning his youth in New York and Greece, life in Nigeria, struggles and travels
across the globe, to the present day.