Interview with the Italian philosopher Franco "Bifo" Berardi:

  

"We will witness the final collapse of the global economic order"

The author of La factory of unhappiness believes that this end of the cycle "could open the door to an essentially chaotic political and military hell. Chaos is the true dominator of the pandemic era." Bifo also talks about vaccines, the environment, virtuality and human bonds sunk in an "epidemic of loneliness."

By María Daniela Yaccar: “We are at a threshold that can last for years”, sentence Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Italian writer, philosopher and activist, in dialogue with Página / 12. At a time that "is not for conclusions", he analyzes the scenario and foresees alternatives. He writes, in an extensive email, that “chaos is the dominator of the time”, and that “a final collapse of the global economic order” and a deployment of autonomous communities centered on equality are possible. Disbelieve the power of the State. The real power, for him, is in capitalism. It goes through several topics that make this total fact that is the pandemic. Vaccine, environment, virtuality, human bonds sunk in an "epidemic of loneliness".

In quarantine, apart from painting, Bifo has written a very original and literary text called Chronicle of psychodeflation, which contains a definition of the coronavirus: "semiotic virus", "psychotic fixation" that "proliferates in the stressed body of global humanity" and it has blocked “the abstract functioning of the economy.” It is available on the website of the Caja Negra publishing house, which also published the titles Futurability and Phenomenology of the End. Later, Bifo wrote Beyond the Collapse. The writer born in Bologna in 1949 has a history. He has participated in the youth revolts of '68, he was a friend of Félix Guattari, he frequented Foucault. He founded magazines, created alternative radios and community TV signals. Some of his outstanding books are The Unhappiness Factory, Post-Generation Alpha, Felix and The Uprising. Tinta Limón Ediciones is about to launch El Umbral. Chronicles and Meditations. He is currently professor of Social History of the Media at the Academy of Brera, in Milan.

-With the coronavirus, philosophy has remained at the center of the scene. What is your mission in this pandemic?
-It has been the same for thousands of years: understand, conceive, arrange collective thought. The philosopher tries to transform what we perceive in common experience into concepts that illuminate the way. It is very simple, but perhaps exercise becomes problematic. If what we understand of reality implies that there is no ethical, political or scientific way out of a situation, if the philosophical imagination cannot imagine any other way out than barbarism, another horizon than extinction, the work becomes very hard. We have to recognize and tell what seems inevitable from the point of view of understanding, but at the same time always remember that perhaps the unforeseen subverts the plans of the inevitable. That is the mission of philosophy: imagine the unpredictable, produce it, provoke it, organize it.

-In Beyond the Collapse, he proposes two scenarios: “What remains of capitalist power will try to impose a techno-totalitarian control system. But the alternative is here now: a society free from the compulsions of accumulation and economic growth ”. How could an alternative be built?
-The current consequences of the pandemic and lockdown (confinement) are very contradictory. There are divergent, even opposite, trends in the economic sphere, that of power. On the one hand we are witnessing the collapse of the structural knots of the economy. The collapse of demand, of consumption, a long-term deflation that fuels the crisis of production and unemployment, in a spiral that we can define as a depression, but it is more than an economic depression. It is the end of the capitalist model, the explosion of many concepts and structures that hold societies together. At the same time, we are witnessing the enormous strengthening of the capitalism of platforms and digital companies as a whole. The relationship between the financial system and the collapse of the productive economy appears incomprehensible: Wall Street confirms its positive, almost triumphant trend. Is there a huge economic bubble that could burst in the near future? Or, on the contrary, does that mean that financial abstraction has become totally independent of the reality of the social economy? I believe that in the coming year we will witness the final collapse of the global economic order, which could open the door to an essentially chaotic political and military hell. Chaos is the true dominator of the pandemic era. A chaos that capitalism cannot subdue. There is no visible political alternative in the near future. There are riots. There will be. But no unifying political strategy can be imagined.

 

Capitalism Is Threatening the World Values. Are We Paying Attention ...

-You have written that equality, "destroyed in the political imagination in the last 40 years", could gain prominence. Doesn't this idea contrast with what is happening here and now? The virus deepened poverty, unemployment, inequality.
-In the chaotic situation that can unfold, autonomous communities will proliferate, egalitarian survival experiments. Of course, today there is an attempt by business forces, mafia, neoliberals to seize as much as possible of social wealth, physical and monetary resources. But that is not going to stabilize anything. All the stabilization measures that the political forces of government are trying in Europe as elsewhere cannot stabilize anything in the long term. Growth will not return tomorrow or ever. The Earth's Ecosphere will not allow it; it is not allowing it. Demand will not rise, not only because wages are decreasing, but also because the crisis caused by the virus is not only economic. It is essentially psychic, mental: it is a crisis of hopes for the future. In this situation we have to imagine forms of autonomous post-economic life, of self-production of what is necessary, of armed self-defense against power, of global computer coordination.

-What do you think this pandemic means for the world geopolitical order?
-Chaos takes the place of command. It does not exist objectively. There is chaos when the events that concern our existence are too complex, fast, intense for an emotional and conscious elaboration. The invisible and ungovernable virus has led to chaos to a definite level. I cannot foresee the points where the collapse will produce more notable effects. What seems very likely to me is a civil war process in the United States. According to an article published in the Dallas News a few days ago there will be no civil war, but a chaotic situation of permanent terror. American citizens continue to buy firearms, although there is already more than one weapon for every citizen, including children and grandparents. Trumpism has not been provisional insanity. It is the expression of the white soul of a country that was born and prospered thanks to genocide, deportation, mass slavery. The global effects of the disintegration of the United States cannot be foreseen.

-Once a vaccine appears, do you think humanity will relax and ecological damage will deepen again or will the relationship with the environment be rethought? Is there a risk of life in a permanent pandemic state?
-Of course it exists. Covid has been just one of the viruses that can spread contagiously. I cannot elaborate on the possibility of an effective vaccine because I am not a biologist, but I do not believe that the coronavirus experience will end with the vaccine. The 2020 pandemic has only been the beginning of a time of global catastrophes, at the biological, environmental and military levels. The effect of the pandemic on the environment is contradictory as well. On the one hand, there has been a reduction in fossil energy consumption, a blockage of industrial and urban pollution. On the other, the economic situation forces society to deal with immediate problems and postpone long-term solutions. And there is no long term at the level of the environmental crisis, because the effects of global warming are already unfolding. But at the same time we can imagine (and propose) the creation of autonomous community networks that do not depend on the principle of profit and accumulation. Communities of frugal survival.

-Maristella Svampa, Argentine sociologist, postulates that the metaphor of the invisible enemy in political discourse hides the environmental dimension of the virus. Match?
-I agree. Covid-19 is a particular emergency from environmental collapse. The political elites do not seem to me up to the problem, what they say does not seem very important to me. Politics as a whole is powerless. What do "good" politicians (like Conte in Italy) do? They apply the compulsory sanitary discipline, they bow to the scientific decision, which takes the place of the political decision. What are the bad guys doing (Bolsonaro, Trump….)? They refuse scientific decision and affirm the autonomy of politics. But politics has become a game without reason, without knowledge. The power of the politician is madness, revenge, rage against impotence. If politics has been during the modern age an expression of the will, it is now dead because the human will has lost its effectiveness over the real process.

-How do you imagine the links will be after the pandemic? How are they now?

 

The pandemic marks an anthropological break of abysmal depth. Let's think about the most human act of all: the kiss, the approaching of the lips, the gradual and sweet caressing of the tongue inside the mouth of another human being. This act has become the most dangerous and anti-social imaginable. What effect will this novelty have on the collective unconscious? A phobic sensitization to the body and skin of the other. An epidemic of loneliness, and therefore of depression. At the social level, distancing implies the end of all solidarity. At the level of the unconscious it is equivalent to the atomic bomb. We have to reinvent affectivity, desire, touch, sex, but… do we have the psychic strength to do it? I do not think. But I repeat it forcefully: we are at a threshold, we cannot know how we will get out of the oscillation in which the unconscious is captured.

-Agamben has written about the limitation of freedom, "accepted in the name of a desire for security induced by the very governments that now intervene to satisfy it." What do you think about state control with the pandemic in the background?
-The State is increasingly identified with the large computer control agencies, which capture huge amounts of data. It no longer exists as a political, territorial entity. It continues to exist in the heads of sovereignists on the right and on the left. There is no politics, it has lost all its power; The State does not exist as an organization of the collective will, there is no democracy. They are all words that have lost their meaning. The State is the set of compulsory sanitary discipline, techno-financial automatisms, and the violent organization of repression against labor movements. The place of power is not the State, a modern reality that ended with the end of modernity. The place of power is capitalism in its semiotic, psychic, military, financial form: the great corporations of dominance over the human mind and social activity.

-In Latin American countries, the dichotomy that arises in European philosophical texts (capitalism-communism) does not resonate in the same way. Here we think more in terms of a present state. What is your reading of the pandemic regarding two scenarios with structural differences such as Latin America and Europe?
-In Latin America there has been a particular force, a leftist neo-sovereignty discourse, what we could call left populism, according to the version of Laclau, Jorge Alemán and others. The Lulista experience, the Kirchnerist experience, that of Evo in Bolivia and Chavismo are experiments of popular, democratic sovereignty, with social intentions. They have been valuable, perhaps more or less successful. But in the end they have all failed, because the complexity of capitalist globalization leaves no room for maneuver at the national level, provoking the violence of the reaction. The pandemic is proof of the impossibility of acting in the national dimension. Of course, there may be a rational management of the pandemic, like that of Argentina, and an irresponsible and genocidal way like that of Brazil. But in the end the pandemic is causing a global apocalypse that no rational policy can prevent. It also marks the final failure of all sovereign hypotheses, of the left and of the right.

-What do you think of the "antiquarantine" movements? Has the idea of ​​freedom been co-opted by the extreme right?
-The word "freedom" is a misunderstanding of modern philosophy and political thought. Those who speak of freedom in the age of techno-financial automatisms do not know what they are talking about. The enemy of freedom is not the political tyrant, but the mathematical links of finance and the digital ones of the obligatory connection. There is an ontological freedom which means that God decided not to determine the direction of human life, thus leaving free will to humans. But the matter of which organisms are composed profoundly determines the possibility of action of the organism. And the social matter, the economy, the disease, the viral proliferation are true killers of freedom. Modernity has been able to invent a space of true freedom: the power of modern politics (from Machiavelli to Lenin) has been the ability to choose strategically and act tactically in such a way as to fold not all of reality, but relevant spaces of the social, technical, even medical reality. The end of modernity also marks the end of this marginal freedom: the creation of techno-financial automatisms has destroyed the political power of the will; it has killed democracy. The word freedom today means only freedom to exploit those who cannot defend themselves, to make slaves of others, to kill Africans who want to survive by migrating in Europe. Freedom today is a murderous word. Just equality is a word that can reset something of human among humans.

Coronavirus second wave may be even worse

- "I believe that the current pandemic marks the definitive exit from the modern era of expansion and entry into the era of extinction," he wrote. Have you ever imagined how much time we have left? Is extinction inevitable?
-First of all I'm not a fortune teller. When I say that we are entering the era of extinction, I mean that in the future horizon the sole linear conclusion of existing trends (overpopulation, pollution, global warming, reduction of habitable space, multiplication of military expenditures, proliferation of wars, epidemic psychotic) does not imply any other realistic perspective than the extinction of human civility (which is already manifesting itself) and of the human species (which seems increasingly probable). But I am convinced that the inevitable is often not realized because the unpredictable tends to prevail.

Return from death

-One of the many things that the virus modifies is how death and duels are experienced. In Beyond the Collapse you refer to the return of death to the scene of philosophical discourse. How can this change be read?

-Death has been removed, denied, erased in the imaginary scene of modernity. Capitalism has been the most successful attempt to achieve immortality. The accumulation of capital is immortal. Human life identifies with its abstract product and manages to live immortally in abstraction. Consequently, we reject the idea of ​​our individual mortality, because we consider life as private property that cannot be finished. The systematic destruction of the environment is the proof that we do not believe in mortality: it does not matter if we kill nature, because it is the only way to achieve the accumulation of capital, our eternity. But the pandemic forces us to recognize that death exists, that it is the destiny of every living being. Abstraction has lost its power, money can do nothing in the face of death. The problem is that we are not talking (only) about the individual, we are talking about the extinction of the human race as the horizon of our time.
Virtual disease
- "When the pandemic finally dissipates (assuming it does), a new psychological identification may have been imposed: online equates to disease," he wrote. Can you elaborate on this, and where will the body be left?

-Something very interesting could be verified: after a long period of time in which the corporeal relationship has been replaced by the online one, a psychic identification of the online dimension with the disease could be verified, with a period of loneliness and fear. will it solve the oscillation? With an epidemic of suicidal autism or with an explosion of liberating desire? We do not know, but we can reflect on the alternatives that are being designated at the threshold.