has made him desperate.
Fundamentally, I think that we have to meditate on his experience and acknowledge that democracy is over, that political hope is dead. Forever.
Writing and Surfing
I should not write as if I was surfing the wave of this age: it is too dangerous, and I know it. Nevertheless, I cannot renounce the pleasure (the ambiguous and self-defeating pleasure) of interpreting signs that are not yet detectable, and processes that are still deploying.
So, this book is an attempt to map the currents of tidal change.
We are shifting from the Age of Thatcher to the Age of Trump – this is my general interpretation of the present becoming of the world. An anti-global front of so-called populist regimes is taking shape in the Western world, in the space of the demographical and economic decline of the white race (when I employ this word, I know that it has no scientific foundation but I also know that it can act as a powerful political mythology). The election of Trump to the presidency of the United States is the point of no return in the worldwide conflict between capitalist globalism and reactionary anti-globalism.
After the Treaty of Versailles, German society was suddenly impoverished and subjected to a long-lasting humiliation. In that situation, Hitler found his opportunity and his winning move consisted in urging Germans to identify as a superior race, not a humiliated class of exploited workers. This claim worked then and is working again now on a much larger scale: Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, Jarosław Kaczyński and Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen and Boris Johnson, and many more small politicians of mediocre culture who smell the opportunity to win power by embodying the white race’s will to potency in the wake of its decline.
The racial call is getting stronger, so much so that Boris Johnson calls Obama ‘part-Kenyan’, and racial fear motivates the anti-migrant policy of the European Union. The emergent racism is a legacy of colonialism combined with the social defeat of the working class in the Western world.
Frightening as it may be, the trend that I detect in the present becoming of the world is the unification of a heterogeneous front of anti-global forces, the resurgence of national-socialism and a widespread reaction against the decline of the white race perceived as the effect of globalization. As the social reference of the reactionary fronts that are winning all over the world is the defeated white working class, I would rather speak of national-workerism.
Mario Tronti has labelled industrial workers a ‘rude pagan class’ that fights for material interests and not for rhetorical ideals. It is for the sake of material interests the rude class of industrial workers is now turning nationalist and racist, as it did in 1933. Trump has won because he represents a weapon in the hands of impoverished workers, and because the left has delivered them into the hands of financial capital otherwise weaponless. Unfortunately, this weapon will soon be turned against the workers themselves, and lead them towards racial warfare.
This Euro-American anti-global racist front is certainly the fruit of thirty years of neoliberal governance. But until yesterday, in Europe as in the United States the conservatives were globalist and neoliberal. No more.
The looming war is already being defined as fighting along three different fronts. The first front is the neoliberal power that is tightening its grip on governance, pursuing the agenda of austerity and privatization. The second front is the anti-global Trumpism based on white resentment and working-class despair. The third front, taking place largely backstage, is the growing necro-empire of terrorism, in all its different shapes of religious bigotry, national rage and economic strategy, that I identify as necro-capital.
I think that the War on Terror, whose main target is the global jihad, will sooner or later give way to the war between capitalist globalism and worldwide anti-global national-socialism (that may be named ‘Putin-Trumpism’).
Democracy Will Not Come Back
I do not identify impotence as powerlessness. Often when lacking power, people have been able to act autonomously, to create forms of self-organization and to subvert the established power. In this age of precariousness, powerless people have been unable to create effective forms of social autonomy, unable to implement voluntary change, unable to pursue change in a democratic way, because democracy is over.
One of the final nails in the coffin of democracy came in the summer of 2015, when the democratically elected, anti-austerity government of Greece was obliged to bend to financial blackmail. In the very place where democracy had been invented twenty-five centuries ago, democracy was suspended. Rather, what we in the European Union are facing is not merely provisional suspension of democracy, but the final replacement of politics with a system of techno-financial automatism.
Expecting the revivification of democracy and fighting for such a goal would be futile because the very conditions for the effectiveness of political reason (and particularly of democratic politics) have since dissolved. I’m not talking here of a political or a military defeat, or a battle that was lost. Many times in the course of modern history the good guys have been defeated; they have resisted, have recovered and, in the end, have achieved what they needed by playing and winning the democratic game. But I think that this will not happen again.
The systemic conditions for democracy have been cancelled by prevailing irreversible processes. Irreversible is the enslavement of immaterial labour because the global labour market requires boundless competition among workers and pre-emption of any social solidarity. Irreversible is the moral and psychological misery of a generation of children who have learned more words from an electronic screen than from a human voice. Irreversible is the melting of the Arctic ice, and irreversible is the spiral of economic competition and military aggression.
The conditions for democracy are two (at least): freedom and effectiveness of political volition. Both have been dismantled. Since language has been subjected to the rule of the technic, and techno-linguistic automatism has taken hold of social relations, freedom has become an empty word, and political action has grown ineffective and inconsequential. Hoping for the revivification of the values, principles and expectations of democracy is therefore a self-deception, because true decision has been absorbed by the connective machine, and popular rage has been organized instead by nationalist and racist parties.
The psycho-cognitive constitution of the neo-humans (their cognitive hardware, I mean) cannot support the software of the past humanist culture, so words like ‘freedom’, ‘equality’, ‘fraternity’ have lost their situational meaning.
Can the beginning of this mutation be precisely dated? Obviously not. However, I will arbitrarily assign to it the year 1977.
That same year many interesting things happened. In Silicon Valley, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs created the Apple trademark. In London, Sid Vicious cried ‘No Future’. In Italian cities, the last proletarian rebellion of the last century and the first precarious rebellion of the new century went on stage.
Since then we have witnessed something deeper than a change, a transformation or a revolution: we have witnessed a mutation of the molecular composition of the human and of the social organism. Technology has altered the composition of the chemical matter composing the atmosphere, of the semiotic substances composing the Infosphere, and finally of the psycho-cognitive modes of elaboration. This is why political reversibility is impossible, why voluntary action has turned impotent: volition has no bearing when facing irreversible processes.
Conscious volition cannot dismantle the heavy machines that have provoked these irreversible changes: mutation has perfused and rearranged the human mind, and has consequently disempowered consciousness, volition and action.
A sort of palsy has in this way taken possession of the conscious organism.
