through europe - bifo-eng

THE EUROPEAN UNION IS DEAD: How can we get rid of the corpse? How can we restart the process of creation of the union?

Franco Berardi Bifo — Fri, 27 Feb 2015 17:44:38 +0000

“While our colleagues, friends and comrades in Southern Europe continue to rebel against the depletion and impoverishment policies of the Troika, the ECB moves into its new palace,” the FF Blockupy website says. “Blockupy moves on to the road. We will make our own move to the new building and give back to the ECB the garbage – in and with many moving boxes – that should have been thrown into the dustbin of history: racist and sexist division, impoverishment, privatization of public funds and goods and wars to secure resources.”

During the last month, after the victory of Syriza we have been finally obliged to understand the meaning, the nature and the destiny of the European Union.

Aggression against society, predation of social resources, this is the meaning of the Union. Obliteration of democracy is the nature, systemic collapse and civil war the destiny. On March 18th in Frankfurt a demonstration will take place to celebrate the inauguration of the new building of the European Central Bank whose cost is 1.3 billion Euros.

Until one month ago my opinion was based on a principle: reclaiming national sovereignty is a reactionary act that opens the way to nationalism. The interesting mission is the transformation of the Union.

With Tsipras, against financial absolutism

Franco Berardi Bifo — Wed, 12 Feb 2014 12:34:21 +0000

Alexis Tsipras represents the resistance of Greek society against the financial aggression, and for me this would be enough to declare my support to the political list which will have him as their candidate for the next European elections, and to vote for him.

But what are the aims of Tsipras' list? If the outcome of these elections will be merely the expression of an elderly and late-lefty minority (to which I belong) in support of the only young and not yet morally corrupt European politician, it won’t be a great result. Thus, as we take upon ourselves the task of creating the conditions for a success of Tsipras' list, we have to think both about the new horizons which could be opened by a campaign in favour of Tsipras, and about the effects of cultural and social recomposition to which we can aspire.

I don’t have any faith in representative democracy. The void left within democratic institutions by the automatisms of financial capital is now a matter of fact and of common sense. And the European Union is fundamentally a financial autocracy, since the decisions of the European Central Bank are removed from the sphere of influence of the Parliament.

European society is depressed, fragmented, rabidly aggressive. The process of disintegration of the European Union is now too advanced to be arrested. The identitarian egoisms which have been aroused by financial violence are destined to produce their devastating effects. We should have no illusions.

So, what is the point of getting involved, of voting at all?

Journey to Seoul (2)

Franco Berardi Bifo — Tue, 23 Jul 2013 11:39:35 +0000

Read part 1

Aerial protests

Only two generations ago Korean people were so poor that starvation was a frequent and widespread experience. Today, Koreans have reached the same level of wealth and consumption of the most advanced countries in the West. The minimum wage is 4.800 won per hour, more or less 3.5 Euros, and the majority of workers manage to cash around 1500 Euros per month. Teachers are paid better than in Italy or England, around 2000 Euros per month.

But for the youngest generation the prospects are not as rosy. Renting a house has become impossible for the majority of young people, who cannot afford to pay advances of fifty thousand dollars.

Journey to Seoul (1)

Franco Berardi Bifo — Wed, 17 Jul 2013 11:18:44 +0000

Incheon Airport

I had been hesitant for weeks. After accepting the invitation I had a second thought and tried to call off my early availability. I was scared by the distance, and the humid hot weather of the summer of Seoul. So I declined the invitation of the Korean publisher of some of my books.

I sent him an email: “I’m too sick for this journey. I suffer from asthma, the long flight and the sultry moisture would be bad for my health.”

But my publisher, who is a very nice guy, kindly insisted: “Do you really believe that the Northern Koreans will launch a nuclear bomb while you stay here?”

The sarcasm of his message made me hit the roof.

Satanic exorcisms upon the surfacing of truth

Franco Berardi Bifo — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 12:06:01 +0000

I’m not a fan of Nanni Moretti and I don’t like all his movies, but when I watched Habemus papam I fell on my knees recognizing the greatness of this film. Despite being set against the Barroque background of the Church of Rome – mundane manifestation of otherworldly power, – the movie in fact focuses on contemporary depression: the world built by men has gone beyond human reach, entering the orbit of a technical divinity who has escaped human control. The world that technical power has subtracted from divine will is too complex, too fast. It is so cruel that it cannot be elaborated according to the categories of human thought. The category of divinity itself is only the frail projection of human illusion, and God is useless when we can finally understand the ultimate truth: that there is no truth in our history, no hope – only the pleasure of senses and poetry, and the pleasure of collective construction, which is collective illusion, a sensuous bridge over the abyss of the inexistence of meaning. Caminante no hay camino, el camino se hace al andar.

When we know that there is no path and no arrival point, walking demands an exceeding amount of energy. And energy gets exhausted when entropy gets hold of the brain.

I never met Aaron Swartz, but he was my brother.

Franco Berardi Bifo — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 12:24:04 +0000

I never met Aaron Swartz, but he was my brother, although much younger than me.

I cannot interpret his suicide. Suicide is never the effect of a single cause, and it is always impossible to “explain” death.

Nevertheless.

Nevertheless I know something about the causes that pushed Aaron to do what he did.

He was a computer programmer, creator and developer of the web feed format RSS, and a writer, an activist and also a Harvard researcher. Recently he played a prominent role in the SOPA campaign (Stop online piracy act) which had a successful outcome.

Aaron was known – by his friends and by FBI as well - for a history of downloading massive data sets, both to use in research and to release public domain documents from behind paywalls.

In 2008, Swartz downloaded, and released, approximately 20% of the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) database of United States federal court documents managed by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts.

According to federal authorities, over the course of a few weeks in late 2010 and early 2011 Swartz, having a JSTOR personal account as a research fellow at Harvard University, downloaded a large number of academic journal articles via JSTOR.

Semio-capital and the problem of solidarity

Franco Berardi Bifo — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 15:49:53 +0000

This text is based on a panel talk (together with Nina Power) by Bifo during the event ‘We Have Our Own Concept of Time and Motion’, organised by Auto Italia in collaboration with Federico Campagna, Huw Lemmey, Michael Oswell and Charlie Woolley in August 2011.

I beg your pardon for the frantic way of my exposition, but the problem is that the object of my reflections is frantic. We are doing so many things without really understanding what is the framework of our actions. I do not pretend to clarify this framework or our understanding of it; I don’t even pretend to come to some conclusions in this short time. But I will try to say something about the coming problem; the coming collapse; the coming insurrection.

Europe's Agony

Franco Berardi Bifo — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 11:58:30 +0000

The form is swallowing the content.

Capital as a form is no more able to hold together the entropic force of global society, but so far the agony of capitalism is not coinciding with the emergence of autonomous forms of society. Biopolitical innervations of capital in the collective mind and the body are producing in fact a spasm paralyzing the process of subjectivation.

The black hole of financial abstraction is swallowing and destroying the product of two centuries of development and civilization, and is aggressing its content: the productive potency of the general intellect. The social civilization, created during the Modern age is invested and corroded by the metastases of the financial cancer.

How can the content get free from the form? This is the question that we should answer, while, as you can see, the building of civilization is crumbling.

Reassessing Recomposition: 40 Years After the Publication of Anti-Oedipus

Franco Berardi Bifo — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 17:23:00 +0000

1. Post-Oedipal

The process of subjectivation is based on conditions that have dramatically changed in the forty years since the publication of Deleuze and Guttari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Reading that book was a defining moment in my intellectual and political experience, in the first years of the 19070s, when students and workers were fighting and organizing spaces of autonomy and separation from capitalist exploitation. Forty years after the publication of that book the landscape has changed so deeply that very concept of desire has to be re-thought, as it is marking the field of subjectivation in a very different way.

The proliferation of sources of enunciation in this age of the networks, the globalization of the economy and the media, was predicted and in a sense pre-conceptualized Deleuze and Guattari, but they could not know in advance the effects that global capitalism has produced on the unconscious and the dynamics of desire. As production, media and daily life have been subsumed into the sphere of semiocapital we need to reconsider the unconscious from this transformed position.

My starting question is thus: what is capitalism and what is schizophrenia after the psychosocial landscape has been reshaped by the tendencies described by Deleuze and Guattari?

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

Franco Berardi Bifo — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 17:55:39 +0000

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.