J.D. Taylor - Negative Capitalism: Cynicism in the Neoliberal Era - Zero Books, Usa, 29 March 2013

Negative Capitalism: Cynicism in the Neoliberal Era offers a new conceptual framework for understanding the current economic crisis. Through a ranging series of analyses and perspectives, it argues that cynicism has become culturally embedded in the UK and US as an effect of disempowerment by neoliberal capitalism. Yet despite the deprivation and collapse of key social infrastructure like representative democracy, welfare, workers' rights and equal access to resources, there has so far been no collective, effective and sustained overthrow of capitalism. Why is this? The book's central call is for new strategies that unravel this narcissistic cynicism, embracing social democracy, constitutional rights, mass bankruptcies and animate sabotage. Kafka, Foucault, Ballard and de Sade are clashed with the X-Factor, ruinporn, London, and the artwork of Laura Oldfield Ford. Negative Capitalism's polemic is written to incite responses against the cynical malaise of the neoliberal era.

J.D. Taylor is a writer and community worker from south London. His experiences come from three years' frontline working in various charities and community support services, as well as a Cultural Studies MA from Goldsmiths. Working under various pseudonyms as an active participant in the contemporary anti-cuts movement, he was also taught by Mark Fisher in the FE college which provides much of the empirical basis of his 'Capitalist Realism'. He writes on politics, cultural studies, philosophy and fiction at drownedandsaved.wordpress.com, and Nyx, a Noctournal (www.nyxnoctournal.org), which he also co-edits.

• Negative Capitalism represents a new generation of critique by what I've termed graduates without a future. Taylor brings together incisive and provocative analysis alongside personal experience to explore how debt, cynicism, smartphones, psychopharmacology, underemployment and neoliberalism all represent a new era of negation. In a time of economic meltdown and mass struggle, this book offers one way out of the current crisis. ~ Paul Mason, BBC Newsnight Economics Editor and author of Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere, and Meltdown
• The seriously researched sections on London and gentrification, class and the riots, Ruin Porn and DIY Porn, the brave and risky notes on fascism, and the intriguing practical proposals near the end all really stand out. ~ Owen Hatherley, author of Uncommon and A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, email
• Negative Capitalism is a timely reminder of how a logic of negation is as central to an analysis of culture, politics, and the economy as it is to the machinations of capital itself. ~ Eugene Thacker, author of In The Dust Of This Planet - Horror of Philosophy, vol. 1, Email
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