Financial Psychedelia and the Commons

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.

Acknowledgements
Preface to the English edition
Chapter 1: Counterculture and Cyberculture: the 1960s vs 1990s
Chapter 2: The Music of the Grateful Dead
Chapter 3: Exodus, Community Spirit and the Commons
Chapter 4: Open Source, Hacker Spirit, Proprietary Individualism, and Anarcho-Capitalism
Chapter 5: The Money of the Commonwealth and the Financial Counterculture
Chapter 6: Desiring Subjectivities and Californian Ideology: Towards a new form of subsumption?
List of Grateful Dead's Live concerts
Bibliography