On the Need for Global Deterritorialized Counter-Struggles

* Article: Reactivating the Social Body in Insurrectionary Times: A Dialogue with Franco 'Bifo' Berardi. By Hugill, David and Thorburn, Elise. Berkeley Planning Journal, 25(1), 2012

URL = http://escholarship.org/uc/item/7z74819g

"interview with Franco "Bifo" Berardi that covers a broad swathe of topics, including issues of education, debt, crisis, and mediation in the contemporary historical conjuncture."

Abstract

"The Italian theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi has spent a lifetime participating in revolutionary movements and thinking through their complexities. He is best known in the English-speaking world for his association with the Italian autonomist movement Operaismo (“workerism”) and its prominent attempts to transform communist politics by resituating the “needs, desires, and organizational autonomies” of workers at the foundation of political praxis (Genosko and Thoburn 2011: 3). This text assembles excerpts from three interviews we conducted with Berardi over the course of the insurrectionary year 2011. Each of our conversations coincided with notable developments in last year’s mobilizations and our interviewee’s enthusiasm about those events is evident at certain points in the transcript. Yet while Berardi is generally optimistic about the revolts and the “reactivation of the social body” that they seem to imply, he reminds us that protest alone will not be enough to win the genuine kinds of autonomy that he suggests are necessary. He argues that dogmas of growth, competition and rent have so colonized every sphere of “human knowledge” that they have begun to threaten the very survival of what he calls “social civilization.” The hegemonic grip of this “epistemological dictatorship” has altered our capacity to feel empathy towards one another, severing fundamental bonds of inter-personal connection. Yet in spite of this dark diagnosis, Berardi is not a doomsayer and he always leaves open the possibility of transformation and escape. He counsels that our best shot at deliverance lies in the development of new strategies of withdrawal, refusal, sabotage, and the negotiation of new “lines of flight” from the late-capitalist forms of domination."

Excerpts

excerpt, page 3 ( 212 ) ...

"Bifo points to the limits of too enthusiastic an embrace of space-based urban struggle. His point is not to deny the importance of marches and occupations but to suggest that a more formidable foe resides in the deterritorialized orbit of software and algorithms, financial flows and behavioral automatisms. Indeed, he argues that the hegemonic grip of this “epistemological dictatorship” has altered our capacity to feel empathy towards one another, severing fundamental bonds of inter-personal connection." (http://escholarship.org/uc/item/7z74819g)

Introduction

David Hugill and Elise Thorburn:

"The Italian theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi has spent a lifetime participating in revolutionary movements and thinking through their complexities. He is perhaps best known in the English-speaking world for his association with the Italian Operaista (“workerist”) movement – known colloquially as “Autonomism” or “Autonomist Marxism” - and its prominent attempts to transform communist politics by re-centering the “needs, desires, and organizational autonomies” of workers as the foundation of political praxis (Genosko and Thoburn 2011). The Autonomist tradition is primarily concerned with the autonomy of human subjects: it is a Marxism that insists on the primacy of laborers as active agents. Thus where Western Marxisms have tended to focus on the dominant logic of capital itself, Autonomists have sought to affirm the power of workers first, understanding transformations in the capitalist mode of production primarily as responses to class struggle (Dyer-Witheford 2004); the political history of capital, in other words, can be read as a “history of successive attempts of the capitalist class to emancipate itself from the working class” (Tronti 1979 quoted in Trott 2007). This inversion of the dialectical relationship between labor and capital (sometimes called the “Copernican Turn”) is thus often considered the hallmark of Autonomist theory (Moulier 1989).

What follows are excerpts of three interviews that we conducted with Bifo over the course of the insurrectionary year 2011. Each of our conversations coincided with notable developments in last year’s mobilizations and our interviewee’s enthusiasm about those events is evident at certain points in the transcript. Our first encounter was at an Edufactory meeting in Paris at which a range of groups had come together to build a common front against the neoliberalization of universities in Europe and around the world. The conference was held just weeks after the ouster of Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and the proceedings were routinely interrupted by live updates from the ongoing revolution in Egypt. Indeed, news of the emergent ‘Arab Spring’ coupled with the energy of attendees from ongoing student mobilizations in Britain, Italy, Chile and elsewhere, animated the conference with a palpable sense that a new cycle of struggle was once again upon us. Our follow-up conversations with Bifo - both held remotely - were animated by a similar backdrop of upheaval as that revolutionary spring bled into an equally oppositional summer and then gave to an occupied fall. Yet while our interviewee remains generally optimistic about the events of 2011 and the “reactivation of the social body” that they seem to imply, he is also quick to remind us that protest alone will not be enough to win the genuine kinds of autonomy that he suggests are vitally necessary. As we shall see, Bifo’s primary concern is with the ways in which particular dogmas of growth, competition and rent have colonized the spheres of “human knowledge.” He argues that the persistence of these “mental cages” threatens the very survival of “social civilization” and remains critical about the capacity of protest to interrupt their pervasiveness. There are tactical implications to these observations and Bifo - both in the text below and elsewhere - asks tough questions about whether marches and occupations are effective strategies for targeting contemporary arrangements of domination. Unlike the geographer Eric Swyngedouw (2011), who insists that the seizure of urban space continues to be at the heart of “emancipatory geo-political trajectories,” Bifo points to the limits of too enthusiastic an embrace of space-based urban struggle. His point is not to deny the importance of marches and occupations but to suggest that a more formidable foe resides in the deterritorialized orbit of software and algorithms, financial flows and behavioral automatisms. Indeed, he argues that the hegemonic grip of this “epistemological dictatorship” has altered our capacity to feel empathy towards one another, severing fundamental bonds of inter-personal connection. As he puts it elsewhere:

We have lost the pleasure of being together. Thirty years of precariousness and competition have destroyed social solidarity. Media virtualization has destroyed empathy among bodies, the pleasure of touching each other, and the pleasure of living in urban spaces. We have lost the pleasure of love, because too much time is devoted to work and virtual exchange (Berardi and Lovnik 2011).

Yet Bifo is not a doomsayer, in spite of this dark diagnosis, and he always leaves open the possibility of transformation and escape. He counsels that our best shot at deliverance lies in the development of new strategies of withdrawal, refusal, sabotage, and the negotiation of new “lines of flight” from late-capitalist forms of domination. There are good reasons to be optimistic as we reflect on the flourishing of this new “spring” of resistance but as Mike Davis (2011: 5) warns us “spring is the shortest of seasons.” Bifo’s observations are critical reminders that the hardest work will come as we try to sustain, transform and hone the insurrectionary energies of 2011. We hope this dialogue contributes to that process in some modest way."