Biopolitics, Marxism and Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

This essay seeks to supplement Thomas Piketty's work in "Capital in the Twenty-First Century” by exploring connections between Piketty and Antonio Negri's post-Marxist work. Piketty tries to excise consideration of so called "human capital” from his analysis, whereas Negri puts such human, creative or what he calls "biopolitical” considerations front and center in his analysis of contemporary capitalism, opening up fresh points of intervention that can help us to understand where capitalism is headed in the future. As the nature of capital continues to mutate today, so must our responses to it. In Negri's biopolitical world, performative subjectivity or human capital finds its charge not through making products and commodities, but in the ongoing project of making ourselves. So aesthetics and the concerns of the humanities are not merely epiphenomenal, reflective, representational, or superstructural discourses (as Piketty understands them); but the arts and humanities - the powers of creative everyday subjectivity- remain a crucial linchpin for understanding the workings of (and against) capital in the twenty-first century.