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introduction

I WROTE THIS book in different moments and circumstances during the last decade. Its parts were therefore conceived and structured in different ways and with varying aims. Readers will not be surprised to find that these compositional features are expressed in the style of the different texts they encounter here. Recent events, like the student revolts in Athens, London, and Rome, the Arab insurrections of the first months of 2011, and the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, did not find a place in the book, but they are fully inscribed in its spirit and conception, and stand as a confirmation of the irreversible devastation of the modern values of social civilization that neoliberal dogmatism has provoked. Taken together, these processes of conception, structure, aim, and style have composed a book about the end of the future, immersed in the complex constellations of the present.

In the first chapter—“The Century that Trusted in the Future”—I retrace the history of the imagination of “the future” over the twentieth century, from the enthusiastic expectations and proclamations of the Futurists to the punk announcement of “No Future.” This part, which I wrote in 2009, ranges from the Futurist Manifesto of 1909 to the digital Futurism of the Wired ideology that blossomed in the last decade of the twentieth century.

If the first chapter follows a precise outline and was written in a consecutive period of time, the second is a constellation of articles and short essays that I published during the last ten years in the midst of the movement for global justice. These have appeared previously in Rekombinant. org, Generation Online, SubStance, and Occupied London.

The third chapter is dedicated to the concept of semiocapitalism and to the emergence of a societal form where Baroque spirit, plebeian violence, and high-finance criminality commingle: Italy in the age of Berlusconi.

The fourth chapter is focused on activism and current ideas about subjectivity. I try to answer the question: how can we imagine a future of conscious collective subjectivation? How will it be possible to create a collective consciousness in the age of precariousness and the fractalization of time? How will it be possible to practice social autonomy in a world where capitalism has instituted irreversible trends of destruction?

The vertiginous zero zero decade has changed our views and our landscape in an astounding way. From the dotcom crash to September 11th 2001, from the criminal wars of the Bush administration to the near collapse of the global financial economy, the recent history of the world has been marked by shocking events and surprising reversals. For me, this decade, heralded by the uprising of Seattle, and initiated by the spreading of the counterglobalization movement, has been exciting, surprising and exhilarating—but it has finally turned sad.

By the end of the decade, notwithstanding the victory of Barack Obama in the United States, the prospect was gloomy. Corporate capitalism and neoliberalism have produced lasting damage in the material structures of the world and in the social, cultural, and nervous systems of humankind. In the century’s last decade, a new movement emerged and grew fast and wide, questioning everywhere the power of capitalist corporations.

I use the word “movement” to describe a collective displacing of bodies and minds, a changing of consciousness, habits, expectations. Movement means conscious change, change accompanied by collective consciousness and collective elaboration, and struggle. Conscious. Collective. Change. This is the meaning of “movement.”

From Seattle 1999 to Genoa 2001 a movement tried to stop the capitalist devastation of the very conditions of civilized life. These were the stakes, no more, no less.

Activists around the world had a simple message: if we don’t stop the machine of exploitation, debt, and compulsory consumption, human cohabitation on the planet will become dismal, or impossible.

Well, ten years after Seattle, in the wake of the 2009 Copenhagen summit failure, we can state that those people were speaking the truth.

The global movement against capitalist globalization reached an impressive range and pervasiveness, but it was never able to change the daily life of society. It remained an ethical movement, not a social transformer. It could not create a process of social recomposition, it could not produce an effect of social subjectivation. Those people were silenced by President Bush, after the huge demonstrations of February 15, 2003, when many millions of people worldwide gathered in the streets against the war in Iraq.

The absence of movement is visible today, at the end of the zero zero decade: the absence of an active culture, the lack of a public sphere, the void of collective imagination, palsy of the process of subjectivation. The path to a conscious collective subject seems obstructed.

What now? A conscious collective change seems impossible at the level of daily life. Yes, I know, change is happening everyday, at a pace that we have never experienced before. What is the election of a black President in the United States if not change? But change is not happening in the sphere of social consciousness. Change happens in the spectacular sphere of politics, not in daily life—and the relationship between politics and daily life has become so tenuous, so weak, that sometimes I think that, whatever happens in politics, life will not change.

The fantastic collapse of the economy is certainly going to change things in daily life: you can bet on it. But is this change consciously elaborated? Is this connected with some conscious collective action? It isn’t. This is why neoliberal fanaticism, notwithstanding its failure, is surviving and driving the agenda of the powers of the world.

The so-called counterglobalization movement, born in Seattle at the close of the century, has been a collective conscious actor, a movement of unprecedented strength and breadth. But, I repeat, it has changed nothing in the daily life of the masses; it hasn’t changed the relationship between wage labor and capitalist enterprise; it hasn’t changed daily relationships among precarious workers; it hasn’t changed the lived conditions of migrants. It hasn’t created solidarity between people in the factories, in the schools, in the cities. Neoliberal politics have failed, but social autonomy hasn’t emerged.

The ethical consciousness of the insanity of neoliberal politics spread everywhere, but it did not shape affective and social relations between people. The movement remains an expression of ethical protest. It has, nonetheless, produced effects. The neoliberal ideology that was once accepted as the word of God, as a natural and indisputable truth, started to be questioned and widely denounced in the days following the Seattle riots. But the ethical demonstrations did not change the reality of social domination. Global corporations did not slow the exploitation of labor or the massive destruction of the planet’s environment. Warmongers did not stop organizing and launching deadly attacks against civilian populations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, and many other parts of the world.

Why? Why did the largest demonstration in human history, the antiwar Global Action that the movement launched on February 15, 2003, fail to stop the bombing of Baghdad?

Why was conscious collective action, although massive and global, unable to change things? This is the question I’ve been trying to answer for the last ten years. This is the question that I am trying to answer in this book.

I’ll say here, in short, that the answer is not to be found in the political strategy of the struggle, but in the structural weakness of the social fabric.

During the twentieth century, social struggle could change things in a collective and conscious way because industrial workers could maintain solidarity and unity in daily life, and so could fight and win. Autonomy was the condition of victory, because autonomy means the ability to create social solidarity in daily life, and the ability to self-organize outside the rules of labor and exploitation. Autonomous community was the condition of political strength. When social recomposition is possible, so is collective conscious change.

In social history we can speak of recomposition when the forces of labor create common cultural flows and a common ground of sensibility, so that they become a collective actor, sharing the same questions and sometimes the same answers.

In conditions of social recomposition, social autonomy from capital becomes possible. Autonomy is the possibility of meeting the power of capital, with counterpower in daily life, in factories, neighborhoods, homes, in the affective relationships between people.

That seems to be over. The organization of labor has been fragmented by the new technology, and workers’ solidarity has been broken at its roots. The labor market has been globalized, but the political organization of the workers has not. The infosphere has dramatically changed and accelerated, and this is jeopardizing the very possibility of communication, empathy, and solidarity.

In the new conditions of labor and communication lies our present inability to create a common ground of understanding and a common action. The movement that spread in the first years of the decade has been able to denounce the effects of capitalist globalization, but it hasn’t been able to find the new path of social organization, of autonomy from capitalist exploitation.

This book is not linear in its composition. It is an expression of the complex constellations that comprise our present. The reader may find that the development is not always perfectly consistent. Actually it is not, because I don’t know where we are heading at the moment, and I don’t pretend to have a solution for the current problems of social autonomy. What I can do is sketch the map of our wanderings. And search for a way out.