Marco D'Eramo – författare

From the breweries of Colorado and the faculties of Harvard to the Nobel Prize ceremonies in Stockholm, Marco D’Eramo guides us through the places where a new war has been thought out, planned and financed. It’s a real war, though it has been fought silently, without us realizing it. Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in the world, said it best: ‘There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning’.The revolt from above has affected all fields – not only the economy, but also justice and education. It has twisted our ideas of society, family and ourselves. It has taken advantage of every crisis, whether natural disasters, terrorist attacks, recessions or pandemics. It has used every weapon, from the information revolution to the technology of debt. It has changed the nature of power, from discipline to control. It has learnt from the workers’ struggle, using Gramsci and Lenin against them.Maybe the time has come for us to do the same and to learn from our opponents.

From the breweries of Colorado and the faculties of Harvard to the Nobel Prize ceremonies in Stockholm, Marco D’Eramo guides us through the places where a new war has been thought out, planned and financed. It’s a real war, though it has been fought silently, without us realizing it. Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in the world, said it best: ‘There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning’.The revolt from above has affected all fields – not only the economy, but also justice and education. It has twisted our ideas of society, family and ourselves. It has taken advantage of every crisis, whether natural disasters, terrorist attacks, recessions or pandemics. It has used every weapon, from the information revolution to the technology of debt. It has changed the nature of power, from discipline to control. It has learnt from the workers’ struggle, using Gramsci and Lenin against them.Maybe the time has come for us to do the same and to learn from our opponents.

We've all been tourists at some point in our lives. How is it we look so condescendingly at people taking selfies in front of the Tower of Pisa? Is there really much to distinguish the package holiday from hipster city-breaks to Berlin or Brooklyn? Why do we engage our free time in an activity we profess to despise?The World in a Selfie dissects a global cultural phenomenon. For Marco D'Eramo, tourism is not just the most important industry of the century, generating huge waves of people and capital, calling forth a dedicated infrastructure, and upsetting and repurposing the architecture and topography of our cities. It also encapsulates the problem of modernity: the search for authenticity in a world of ersatz pleasures.D'Eramo retraces the grand tours of the first globetrotters - from Francis Bacon and Samuel Johnson to Arthur de Gobineau and Mark Twain - before assessing the cultural meaning of the beach holiday and the 'UNESCO-cide' of major heritage sites. The tourist selfie will never look the same again.

"You expect the city of Al Capone and what you find are pleasant boulevards coursing up and down between the neo-classical buildings of the 1893 Universal Exhibition ... The city center unfolds before you, an architectural miracle that is to twentieth-century urban planning what Venice must have been for the fifteenth century."Like a cross between Philip Marlowe and Walter Benjamin, Marco d'Eramo stalks the streets of Chicago, leaving no myth unturned. Maintaining a European's detached gaze, he slowly comes to recognize the familiar stink of modernity that blows across the Windy City, the origins of whose greatness (the slaughterhouses, the railroads, the lumber and cereal-crop trades) are by now ancient history, and where what rears its head today is already scheduled for tomorrow's chopping block. Chicago has been the stage for some of modernity's key episodes: the birth of the skyscraper, the rise of urban sociology, the world's first atomic reactor, the hard-nosed monetarism of the Chicago School. Here in this postmodern Babel, where the contradictions of American society are writ large, d'Eramo bears witness to the revolutionary, subversive power of capitalism at its purest.

Chicago är den mest amerikanska av USAs metropoler. Till skillnad från New York, San Francisco och Los Angeles låter Chicago oss ana vad som verkligen rör sig i Amerikas hjärta. Som en korsning mellan Philip Marlowe och Walter Benjamin smyger Marco d'Eramo längs stadens gator. Med sitt begreppsliga bagage från Gamla världen och européns distanserade, klentrogna blick granskar han alla myter. Snart känner han igen den unkna lukten av modernitet som blåser över Chicago. Dess ursprung (slakthusen, järnvägen, timmer- och spannmålshandeln) är historia, och det nya som föds idag är dömt att hamna på sophögen imorgon. Chicago -- en gång en av de städer i världen med störst svensk befolkning -- har varit spelplats för några av modernitetens nyckelhändelser: skyskrapans födelse, stadssociologins framväxt, världens första kärnreaktor, Chicagoskolans nationalekonomiska doktrin. I detta postmoderna Babel, där det amerikanska samhällets särdrag och motsägelser är djupt inristade, bevittnar vi kapitalismens revolutionära, subversiva kraft i sin renaste form. Marco d'Eramo är född i Rom 1947. Han var från början fysiker, men gick över till att läsa sociologi med Pierre Bourdieu vid Ecole pratique des hautes études i Paris. Han medverkar regelbundet i tidningen Il manifesto.