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Talk at KAFCA conference, Barcelona 2/12/2011

Written by Federico Campagna, 07.12.2011
This piece derives in part from an article I wrote in October 2011, titled Recurring Dreams: the red heart of fascism. In that article, I tried to analyze two different types of debt (the money-debt and the life-debt) in the light of the history of Western capitalism and of the current financial crisis. Also, I drew a number of comparisons between the current European/American situation and the one experienced during the inter-war period by those countries defeated in WWI. I attempted to warn of a recurrence of the breeding times of fascism/nazism, in which people’s exasperation for the devastating effects of a debt crisis risks turning into the desire for a higher authority to take absolute control and impose a new order. Finally, I warned of the ‘red’ – that is, left-wing, social – core of the early 20th century versions of fascism and nazism, and I identified similar desires in vast strata of today’s left.
 
Since I wrote that text, however, things have changed. With the rise of unelected, technocratic governments in Italy and Greece, with the deepening of the crisis and the enforcement of even more austerity measures, with the waves of occupations and repression in countless countries, and, most notably, with the umpteenth split in the left, the set of dangers and opportunities, I believe, has changed. To the risk of fascism, still present in the hearts of many, especially on the populist fringes, I would like to add that of authoritarian social capitalism. To the opportunity of revolutionary politics, I would like to add that of prefigurative-politics and of anarchist reformism.
 

The Right to Insolvency and the Disentanglement of the General Intellect's Potency

Written by Franco Berardi Bifo, 05.12.2011
Austerity in Europe
 
"The German worker does not want to pay the Greek fisherman's bills," the fanatics of economic fundamentalism are saying, while pitting workers against workers and leading Europe to the brink of civil war.
 
The entity that is "Europe" was conceived in the aftermath of the Second World War as a project to overcome modern nationalism and create a non-identitarian union based on principles of humanism, enlightenment, and social justice. What is left of this original project, after the recent financial collapse that has stormed the American economy and jeopardized the Eurozone? Since the beginning of the European Union, the constitutional profile of the European entity has been weakly defined, such that economic goals of prosperity and monetarist financial constraints have taken the place of a constitution. In the 1990s, the Maastricht Treaty marked a turning point in this process. It sanctioned the constitutionalization of monetarist rule and its economic implications: a decrease in social spending, cuts in labor costs and an increase in competition and productivity. The effects of a narrow application of the Maastricht rules became evident in 2010: overwhelming Greece and Ireland and endangering other countries, the financial crisis exposed the contradictions between the desires for economic growth, social stability, and monetarist rigidity. In this situation, the Maastricht rules have been shown to be dangerous, and the overall conception of the EU, based on the centrality of economic competition, has revealed its frailty.
 

The mystery of advertising and the city of the future

Written by Federico Campagna, 21.11.2011
This text derives from a conversation with Robert Prouse
 
Preamble: the flood
 
As we witness the fireworks of global finance exploding in the sky, together with the narratives and hopes of the last three decades, we might be missing the silent activity that  swarms around our feet. On the muddy ground of today’s semiotic life, the sudden lack of our attention to the moves of semiocapitalism has not led to any slowing of its processes of transformation of our internal and external environments. Language, affects, emotions, attention and meaning continue to be subsumed by the production system, maybe now more than ever. They are extracted from us in rivers, they are conveyed into the catching areas of Capital, and then stored within the mighty dam of Marketing. There, they are supposed to work by inertia, pushing the engines of economic production with their sheer weight. It used to be called the advertising circle, then it became the totality of semiocapitalism.
 

#occupyervoice

Written by Francesca Martinez Tagliavia, 15.11.2011

#1440

occupy the Battle of Anghiari*

occupy the battle of Rome

occupy a woman in a gesture

#occuponslarésistance

The last days of the Berlusconi empire

Written by Leo Goretti, 12.11.2011

  On Tuesday evening, at the end of another day of petty parliamentary bargaining, the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi announced that he will resign once the Italian budget is approved by the Parliament. This step has allegedly been made to comply with the requests “of the European Commission” (this should probably read the BCE, the IMF, and the financial markets).

After almost twenty years, it seems that the political trajectory of Berlusconi is about to come to an end. In truth, his political career ended at least one year ago, when his parliamentary majority was saved by “persuading” a handful of MPs from the benches of the opposition to change sides.

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