Spinoza, New Materialism and the Contemporary

New Materialism and the Metaphysics of Capitalist Daily Life is a critique of the material turn in cultural theory and the humanities, and the way this has erased social relations between people and re-directed attention to things, objects, and matter. The role of these matter-ist discourses, DeFazio argues, is to foster consumption and social alienation while obscuring the relations of exploitationwhich sharply divide working people from owners of capital and which are the basis of consumption. The book advances a sustained critical analysis of these discourses, while at once developing a new theory of materialism that foregrounds people over objects and natures and a society based on meeting peoples needs (rather than private profit).