George Caffentzis turned 80 years old today. P.I.T. in Brooklyn hosted a gathering to celebrate his and Monty Neill’s birthdays, and to release George’s first book of poetry, At the End of Everything, published by Common Notions press. The book is small at just about eighty pages and collects poems George has written throughout the course of his life, from his adolescence through 2024 (the book notes that his first poem, “Futile Phantasy,” was published in his high school literary journal in 1961).
I can’t recall the first time I met or spoke with George. Like many others, I first encountered the work of Midnight Notes Collective – which George co-founded, along with Monty Neill and John Willshire-Carrera – as a participant in the counter-globalization movement of the late 1990s. Either from their collection Midnight Oil or from Harry Cleaver’s foundational book Reading Capital Politically, I sought out the essays in the first issue of Zerowork (which, at that time, were not available online if memory serves). In that first issue George had published an essay entitled “Throwing Away the Ladder: The Universities in Crisis.” I think I was trying to grasp the workerist conceptualization of the crisis of Keynesianism and failing to square a piece of data in that essay with a related datapoint in one of the essays in the Trilateral Commission’s The Crisis of Democracy book. I sent George a note to see if he could help me understand it (in retrospect this was really quite presumptuous!) George, ever generous with his intellect and time, kindly looked through the essay that he had written decades earlier and walked me through his take. Many times after that, George would offer his perspective and encouragement, as he has to countless other younger activists. I know I am not alone in holding his brilliant essay “The Work/Energy Crisis and the Apocalypse” – which is, regrettably, still timely – to be one of the most stunning and insightful analyses of the “energy crisis,” the refusal of work, and the political economy of capitalist “apocalypse.” Over the past couple of decades, whenever I have sought to try and understand developments in capitalism or contemporary social struggles I have looked for George’s writings, and I have learned tremendously from his razor sharp readings of Marx and analyses of class composition.
The celebration of the publication of George’s book of poetry and his birthday was a beautiful, warm, and deeply caring event. Though I knew some of the people there, there were many more I didn’t now, and the space was packed, which was quite wonderful and certainly fitting. Silvia Federici (the leading feminist and Marxist theorist, and George’s partner of many decades) carried the event from beginning to end, reading many of the poems in the book and explaining their context, and she was joined by readings from Monty Neill, Malav Kanuga (who gave a beautiful statement before reading a poem), and by George himself. George has struggled with illness in recent years, and it was an honor to listen to him and also to hear Silvia read and discuss so many of his poems. Their love and care for one another is truly something to behold (and is the subject of some of the poems in the book).
Silvia began the readings with her poem “To the Cube Steak,” named after a long-closed diner in Park Slope run by George’s father and uncles. George then gave some introductory remarks and went on to read three of his poems: “A spider in my show” (1969), “Experience of Paradise” (2024), and “Dragonflies” (1977).
Below is video of his remarks and George’s reading:
Monty (Neill) read George’s poem “Pilgrimage to a Transvestite Saint” (I couldn’t capture it) and Malav (Kanuga) also read a poem that I, unfortunately, couldn’t capture. Silvia read George’s poem “Poem for Sol Yurick,” referring to friend and comrade (as well as famed novelist and former NYC social services worker) Sol Yurick. Here is Silvia reading that poem:
Here is Silvia reading George’s 2014 poem entitled “Poem for Joe Grange.” Grange was a philosophy professor at University of Southern Maine (where George taught for many years) and close friend of George’s:
The last video for this post is Silvia’s reading of George’s poems “Buenaventura” (2016) and “Guatemala City at Easter-time” (2018) with introductory remarks:
Readers of this blog may appreciate George’s poem “The End of Zerowork,” which is a personal and poetic take take on what by all accounts was a very emotionally exhausting and difficult political break.
There are many other poems in this little book and if you’re interested in grabbing a copy you can order one from the publisher here. I’ve gone through it once tonight and have dog-eared more than a dozen poems I plan to go back to this week.
Given the current political nightmare we all find ourselves in, joining comrades to spend a couple of hours celebrating George’s 80th birthday and listen to his poems read out loud was quite a gift.
New York Archives of Autonomist Marxism 