lapo berti
accelerated
fantasies
An emergency exit
for the Left?
series of books
THE
strong
7
OF THE FUTURE
THE
strong
OF THE
FUTURE
2 7
SF007 eng
The book series entitled «The Strong of the Future» deals with
accelerationist philosophy, in particular with the thought based on
Nietzsche, Klossowski and Acéphale magazine, Deleuze and Guattari,
Foucault and Lyotard.
Issues:
SF001 :: OBSOLETE CAPITALISM, The Strong of the Future (July 2016)
SF002 :: OBSOLETE CAPITALISM, Acceleration, Revolution and Money in
Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (August 2016)
SF003 :: EDMUND BERGER, Grungy Accelerationism (September 2016)
SF004 :: OBSOLETE CAPITALISM, Deleuze and the Algorithm of the
Revolution (October 2016)
SF005 :: SIMON REYNOLDS - KATJA DIEFENBACH, Technodeleuze and Mille
Plateaux. Achim Szepanski’s Interviews (1994-1996) (January 2017)
SF006 :: SARA BARANZONI - PAOLO VIGNOLA, Bifurcating at the Root
(February
2017)
SF007 :: LAPO BERTI, Accelerated Fantasies (March 2017))
Next issue:
SF008 :: EDMUND BERGER, Underground Streams: A Micro-History of
Hyperstition and Esoteric Resistance (April 2017)
Accelerated Fantasies ::
translated in English by Ettore Lancellotti, Letizia Rustichelli
and Paolo Davoli.
Anti-copyright, March 2017 Obsolete Capitalism
Creative Commons 4.0
Attribuzione — Devi riconoscere una menzione di paternità adeguata, fornire un link alla licenza e indicare se sono
state effettuate delle modi che. Puoi fare ciò in qualsiasi maniera ragionevole possibile, ma non con modali- tà tali da
suggerire che il licenziante avalli te o il tuo utilizzo del materiale.
Accelerated Fantasies, copyright by Lapo Berti (2015)
ISBN 9788875591007- 6
Accelerated Fantasies
Lapo Berti
Index
Foreword ::
11
Beyond the Ur-Staat of the hi-tech Leninism
by Obsolete Capitalism
Accelerated Fantasies
by Lapo Berti
15
Biography
56
Beyond the Ur-Staat
of hi-tech Leninism
by Obsolete Capitalism
Sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, the figure standing
out in the background of Srnicek and Williams’ «Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics» shapes. After its reading the Ur-Staat shyly pipes out from
the pages of the «Manifesto», a text that may be classified as speculative «scifi Marxism», where we sense an unmistakable scent of antique (more «steam-Marx» than «cyber-Marx»). Allende’s Chilean “Cybersyn” experience or
Slava Gerovitch’s “Soviet-computing” references are not enough to pick up
the thread which links socialist experimentation, economic program and
Marxist ideology, sharply stopped in the 1970’s. It is in fact the primordial
State, or as Deleuze and Guattari used to define it, the primordial despotic
State which rises itself as an institution, as a means to manage the hidden
powers in the relationship among socialism, technology, computational calculation and ideology.
“Of all the institutions, [The Ur-staat] is perhaps the only one to appear
fully armed in the brain of those who institute it”.1 The myth of the primordial State as a mediator of the political conflict between classes in the light
of an accelerationist and Marxist reading, matches with that “characteristi-
1
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 218 - University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis,
1983.
11
cally intense energy” emanating from another original myth: Prometheism
as an expression of blind faith in a positive, noble and forward-looking technique. Therefore Srnicek and Williams are to be placed paradoxically more
in the dystopian science-fiction “steampunk” area (backward looking at the
relationship between social progress and technology - what if the USSR had
invented the Internet and given the personal computer to the masses?)
than in the “cyberpunk” one. «Communism is Lenin - according to me»
Mario Tronti recently said. Equally the «Manifesto for an Accelerationist
Politics» displays a peculiar hi-tech version of Leninism, thus positioning
Srnicek and Williams’s text in the dominant XX century «collective worker»
thought of the Left.
In the revised and modernized socialism of XXI century, as suggested by
Srnicek e Williams, socialising the heavy industry is not politically productive, whereas the IT sector is. The new beast to tame is the cognitive capitalism of the «digital platforms». To the classic Hegel-Marx binomy of «capital
and work», the two young intellectuals propose «robo-post-capitalism and
freedom from work», while the State continues to represent an artificial entity subjugated to the new virtual circuiting of a digital mobility, enhanced
to travel-philosophy. According to Srnicek and Williams, it is the capital in its
objectivity to produce conflict over and over, whereas new subjectivities and
singularities fade in the horizon of the events.
12
Lapo Berti has been one of the first2 in Italy to express doubts on Srnicek e Williams’s text and on their «postcapitalist planning» tesis. From
his heretic post-operaist observatory Lapo Berti denounces in his «Accelerated Fantasies» some of the basic ideas of the manifesto, being the most
interesting one the «constructionist fallacy» as an example of total faith in
the compositional ability of a hi-tech socialist project. To be able to shape
society according to one’s ideals as pointed out by «sacred texts», still represents the forbidden and Faustian dream on which «any communist project
historically collapses». According to Berti, communism has been -and still is
- a secularised, historized process, «discontinued goods» in Tronti’s words.
Here lies the point of contact between the deleuzian-foucauldian-nietzschean «abstract accelerationist line» of the Strong of the Future and Berti’s thought. In view of the heterogeneity of the systems and powers overlapping our
society today, it is no longer possible to oppose the simple speculative and
abstract text of a totalizing theory, were it Srnicek and Williams’ s neo-marxist one.
The irregular, transcendent «social metabolism» often recalled by Berti
cannot be driven by a superior project, if that is the case an inevitable return to absolutism and spiritualization of the Ur-Staat will take place. Moreover in his «Accelerated Fantasies», Berti declares the death of any «revolutionary vanguard» and of its braking triangular thought in the foreground,
a thought that locates progressive trajectories where some illuminated and
competent groups fulfill strategic roles of synthesis and behind which the
2
“Accelerated Fantasies” was written in the first months of 2015 and will be published in English language in the collective volume “Money, Revolution and Philosophy of the Future”
OCFP /Rizosfera in late 2017.
13
tamed masses should rise up following an insufflating order. Supporting the
«death certificate» of the revolution as an «unexpected jump» pampered by
political agitprop groups and promoting the revolution as an «accelerated
process of singularization» we close quoting the words of another heretic
thinker of the Italian Left, Gianni Celati, in one of his interviews, significantly entitled “Against the avant-garde”:
In these new literary or visual avant-garde, a false alternative is always at stake:
to be up ahead or to be beyond, to be smarter or to be naive. The smarter ones are those
who have seen more, understood more and know the new line of breach. The naive
ones are those who believe in a line which the smarter ones have already understood
it won’t work. According to me if the distinctive fact of the avant garde is this false
alternative - meant as «excessive hegelism», (the negative, the critique, etc.) - then all
this world is finished, especially after the development of the counterculture and the
flourishing of the Pop Art. There is no longer an issue of infinite progression but of
intensities, of lines of joy, cultural expressions that have nothing in common with the
critique. What has finished then is the critique itself, the idea of substituting a theory
with a supposed «better one», instead of intercepting movements, motions, social earthquakes, points of flight and new solutions.3
3
Gianni Celati, Contro le avanguardie, online magazine Doppiozero, interview published
in Italian on 18th March 2016. http://www.doppiozero.com/materiali/avanguardia-e-falsa-alternativa
Accelerated Fantasies
An emergency exit for the Left?
by Lapo Berti
“I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and
constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand
in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that
becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and
opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times.
We might as well require a man to wear still the coat
which fitted him when a boy as civilised society to remain
ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors”
(Thomas Jefferson).
Introduction
The authors of the Manifesto speak a dialect that is not
among those I know best within the babel of different languages in which the Left, a little in every country, loses itself as
well as the thread of the political debate; but let us try to make
things clear by looking at facts and processes.
Firstly, I appreciate the pragmatic approach and the blunt
language. It seems a breath of fresh air, compared to the ideological quibbling and the ‘Dannuntianism’ under which a gre15
at part of the Italian Left has buried its ability to elaborate and
communicate sensible and feasible ideas. The whole work is
permeated by a tension, which I deem as extremely positive,
between the sufficiently clear – though analytically groundless
– vision of a world that has profoundly changed compared to
the one on which the traditional Left used to calibrate its propositions and behaviours, and the deeply perceived necessity
of keeping pace with new developments, especially in the technological sphere. Secondly, I appreciate the clear rejection
of leftist politics conceived as “folk politics of localism, direct
action and relentless horizontalism” (03.MANIFESTO: On the
Future). Finally, I agree with the perception that we need to
prepare ourselves for a cultural struggle, which, in my opinion,
will inevitably last for a long period of time – for some decades
at least, in order to nurture the germs of a new anthropological
mutation. I also appreciate the critique that targets the return
to Keynesian economics, which provides further proof of the
Left’s mental idleness, as well as the acknowledgment of the
impossibility of reproducing a Fordist environment similar to
the one that, for decades, provided a foundation for social-democratic programmes.
In other words, they suggest to depart and explore other
oceans in search for new shores. I agree. Let us proceed with a
closer examination.
16
Accelerationism presents itself as a programme aimed at freeing Leftist politics from a minority conservative drift, deemed
guilty of a total lack of an up-to-date analysis of today’s social
structure, and of the inability to recognise the cultural, and
even anthropological, mutation that affected the world populations in the final part of the second millennium. The inability to live the present causes to loose the ability to attend the
future as well. As it often happens to those aristocratic families
in decay, the Left has become prisoner of a glorious past, wrapped in its mythical aura, but remains unable to procure the
means to preserve the family’s wealth. The weeds do the rest,
making the old manors impenetrable. Accelerationism sweeps
all that away, attempts to resolutely seize the dynamics of the
present and to proceed towards a rather nebulous and uncertain future.
The analysis, which provides the background for this programme and should support it, seems quite lacking, if not even
dull and superficial. Additionally, the insistent recourse to metaphors rather than conceptual cuts and analytical perspectives
does not help. Another vacuum, which often makes the argumentation vulnerable, consists in the absence of a theory on
how society functions. But we will discuss this topic later on.
I am tempted to comment point by point this text so filled
with illusions and provocations, beside relevant topics. Howe17
ver, I will limit myself to few scattered remarks, followed by
some general considerations.
Scattered remarks
In my opinion, the most disappointing section is the one dedicated to the “Conjuncture”. The elements chosen define it,
despite being right, seem obvious and randomly listed, rather
than organised according to a far-reaching design. They do not
have the formidable power of opening new interpretative horizons, as the apodictic declaration that opens The Communist
Manifesto continues to do: “The history of all hitherto existing
society is the history of class struggles.” Even without the presumption of mocking the vibrancy and the universality of this
sentence, we should manage to identify the key to access the
present, which would then constitute the one and only chance
of gazing into the future. I believe that, until we deeply understand and analyse why we are here, today, we will not succeed
in imagining a different future and, above all, in finding a feasible transition. The crucial turning point, which we should
focus on, are the seventies, that decisive decade which started
with the termination of the convertibility of the U.S. dollar to
gold, ending the world of the gold standard, and finished with
the rise to power of Reagan and Thatcher. In the middle of
18
that decade many other things happened, but it was there, in
those two episodes, that history changed its course. And, as it
happens almost always during authentic and crucial historical
turning points, nobody noticed anything and everyone kept
staring at an object that was not there anymore. Naturally, I
do not think that Nixon, Reagan and Thatcher chose their history: it was history that chose them, because all those social,
cultural and economic forces and energies that had driven the
thirty years of Keynesian compromise – or Social Democratic, if
you prefer – had been exhausted. We ought to understand the
reasons why that democratically operated U-turn gathered the
prevailing consensus, and why, in the whole world, the Left and
its various expressions have been unable since then to elaborate a successful and persuasive programme. One answer has
been attempted, and probably it is the right one: the composition of the social body had changed. Nonetheless, nobody in
the Left, besides the use of some metaphors (from the more
ancient ones, as the ‘social worker’, to the more recent ones,
such as the ‘multitude’), has actually come to terms with the
real structure of modern society; with all the lives that interact
in it; with the concrete approaches on which individuals figure
or refuse to figure the course of their lives, and share pieces
of images whose source is ever more uncertain; with the ways
through which they gain conscience of themselves as formally
free individuals living in a society. Nobody has tried to understand which avenues the “pursuit of happiness” has taken, both
19
at an individual and – providing it exists – at a collective level.
There is a great deal to reflect on, in any case it is from here
that we ought to restart from, in order to restore a feasible image of the society we live in. It is going to be a long and rough
ride, which probably does not concede nor allow accelerations.
1.2 (On the conjuncture)
The “breakdown of the planetary climatic system” and the
consequential “terminal resource depletion” have both an obvious political leverage, but these topics cannot be brandished
naïvely, after more than forty years from the catastrophic predictions of “The Club of Rome” (ceteris paribus, i.e. all other
things being equal). In order to live up to the problems that
the Club identified, we should discuss them in the perspective
of a theory on the Anthropocene, that is, taking into account
the fact that the presence of the human kind on the Earth has
produced a new and probably irreversible scenario, though
still manageable through necessary adjustments that the environment dictates us by means of natural catastrophes. Most
likely a new philosophical and anthropological perspective is
revealing itself, one that should induce us to radically rethink
the relationship between nature and mankind as well as the
way in which our societies live nature. This would entail recon20
sidering our institutions, our written and unwritten norms, to
which we have entrusted, in a millenary course, the possibility
of reproducing our race on the base of that anthropological
invention that society is. It is a gigantic endeavour, for which
we cannot spot, not even on the far horizon, energies capable
of sustaining such a task.
For what concerns the “enduring financial crisis”, its existence is undeniable. Nevertheless, the crisis perhaps should
be summoned for the opposite reason to the one advocated
in the Manifesto: not as a sign of weakness of capitalism, but
rather as a celebration of its dynamism. I believe, and I always
have, that financial crises are endemic, if not even functional,
to the capitalistic system, because they are closely linked to its
modus operandi and emanate from its propensity to overcome
any limit or obstacle, which represents its primary core as well
as its factor of perpetual attraction. The idea that capitalism is
digging its own grave from crisis to crisis until the final one – a
conception that has been solemnly christened by the “law on
the tendency of the rate of profit to fall” – has miserably sunk
after colliding with the hard and unforeseeable dynamic of innovation and it appears by now childishly comforting and dangerously misleading. The political and institutional reactions to
financial crises, and the possible conflicts that arise with them,
are one of the fundamental engines of social transformation.
Today our panacea is austerity, which, despite being short-si21
ghted and ineffective, constitutes an answer to distortions and
deviations caused by the previous model (the Keynesian one).
Seventy years ago, we responded with Keynesianism and the
New Deal, which proved to be successful because they managed to solve the extremes of the previous model (laissez-faire
economics). Crises, including financial ones, certify that capitalism is in good health. Policies are actually mere epiphanies
of the capitalistic metabolic process. En passant, I do not think
that the increasing automation of production lines is “evidence
of the secular crisis of capitalism”, but rather of the inexhaustible energy that capitalism is able to produce through technological and scientific innovation, aimed at regenerating and
expanding the sources of profit. What appears to be in crisis,
secular or not, is society as a whole, which is called to govern
these processes but has proven to be incapable of doing so for
too long a time. Such a governance vacuum has been filled by
a power that is new and old at the same time, but anyway explosive, i.e. financial and economic power. No counter-power has
stood up, if we exclude – as we should – those pathetic, if not
faked, attempts to regulate markets (antitrust).
Anyway, I think we all agree on the fact that financial crises,
as all crises, represent also an opportunity. The issue that no
theory has yet tackled is that we do not possess adequate instruments to understand the range of truly feasible prospects
as well as the ways to convert them into reality. A void that no
22
rhetorical exercise can fill. Perhaps this is what the Manifesto
intends to argue at 1.3 (On the conjuncture).
1.5 (On the conjuncture)
Preaching a “systematic approach to building a new economy” surely makes the argument sound appealing, but nobody has yet explained what this bears, although many currently
practise discoursing on a new economy and prescribing new
recipes, more or less doomed or purely abstract. “To build” a
new economic system – in the actual meaning of the term, that
is, to conceive a new model and to execute it – is a very tough
endeavour and, frankly, I do not know whether it is within our
society’s reach. Additionally, recent history shows that it is extremely dangerous and socially expensive even to attempt building it. Economic laissez-faire has dominated and continues to
dominate because it has taken a different direction and it focused predominantly (though not exclusively) on the “spontaneous” interaction between the choices that men make based on
their individual interests, even though their motivations may
not be entirely individualistic and egoistic.
The same is true, obviously, when we affirm that a “post-capitalist planning” is necessary (3.8).
23
In my opinion, at present the only still-viable avenue is “local” disturbance (not in a geographical sense), that is, limited
to those specific topics and characterised by dominant processes which appear from time to time in the evolution of society.
I hope it is clear that I am not referring at all to new forms of
“neo-primitivist localism”, which the authors of the Manifesto
rightly criticise and reject. These “disturbances” will probably
spread on the web and generate cumulative processes, but they
will hardly form a critical mass. Unless catastrophic events happen.
3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.7 (MANIFESTO: on the future)
“All of us want to work less”, “Capitalism has begun to constrain the productive forces of technology” (actually, it has
always done so, in one way or another), “We do not want to
return to Fordism”, “to unleash latent productive forces”, “to
accelerate the process of technological evolution”. We cannot
disagree with these slogans which, if ever, have the defect of
being too general. However, the rub is later, when we need to
pass onto action. We have already seen in history the refusal to
work. We can try again, but the chances of success have not improved. In the meanwhile, the world and the workers’ charter
have radically changed (see the Excursus below).
24
General considerations
The scandal of economic and financial power
I have already said how I was struck by the lack of analysis
of the Accelerationist hypothesis. I also want to stress that this
is the least Marxian, if not the most anti-Marxian, conduct. According to Marx the crucial effort was constituted by the critique of the present, not by the elaboration of solutions for
the future. Here is the opposite: the solution anticipates the
critique, it eludes it. I believe instead that in the whole world
the Left has lost, and continues to loose, not because it has not
proposed the right answers, but because it has not been able to
elaborate a correct and critical vision of the present world, of
the metamorphoses of capitalism and, thus, to offer a successful and persuasive story, meeting people’s changed needs and
expectations. Nobody in the Left has yet had the intellectual
bravery and the critical skills to explain why, at the end of the
seventies, the successful political programmes took the name
of Reaganism and Thatcherism. In such a perspective, at least
two topics seem to pose a tough challenge to those who want to
understand what is involved and what is at stake.
Firstly, although for at least twenty years the topic of globa25
lisation has been among the most popular in the global public
debate, we are still far away from tackling all its implications.
We still lack a complete understanding of the fact that the
majority of economic, social, cultural, psychological and, hence, political problems, which cause dramas in single countries
and then spread to the world arena, are simply the product of
flows and tension fields generated by globalisation, that is, the
progressive interconnection of choices and destinies of all the
inhabitants of the planet. We are in the middle of a wading, at
the heart of a transition between total orders. Local, less local
and general crises that we are experiencing in every aspect of
our collective life, including terrorism, are nothing but the inevitable shocks connected to this gigantic process of adjustment
of global society. And it is in the fault lines of this process, at
the turning points that force us nearly every day to choose or to
passively endure, that the opportunities for change have settled
and offer themselves. Even in an Accelerationist perspective.
Secondly, it is surprising that an Accelerationist eye did not
notice that nowadays finance constitutes the main factor of acceleration of capitalistic processes and the protagonist of the
acceleration imprinted on the evolution of the whole system.
The global financial concentration, which represents the domain of a 1% or actually 0.1% of the global population, is the
most shocking result of the globalisation process. The sudden
and gusting accelerations that occur in global finance are sub26
verting yesterday’s world in ways and extents that we still struggle to understand. The reaction, if there is one, is weak and
hesitant. The institutions that are supposed to grant the social
assimilation of those development processes most dangerous
for the tenure of society wander around the economic environment like stunned boxers. There will not be any feasible nor
accessible tomorrow, if we do not get to the bottom of the wild
disorder shaped by global finance as well as of the unbearable
wound that affects the social body through the weapon of extreme inequality and demolition of any form of political (and
democratic) governance.
In other words, the most serious and stunning shortcoming
of the Manifesto seems to be, in my opinion, the total absence
of any reference to the problematic of power, which instead
I think is the source of every problem. If there is a truly catastrophic happening which will permanently mark our era, that
is the subjugation of political power to economics, with the
consequent development of a global oligarchic power able to
erase the sphere of political mediation. We are dealing with a
turning point that could end the modern era as we have known
it, characterised by the generous though unsuccessful attempt
to get everyone involved in power and to transform all people
into investors in that supreme endeavour that is governing society.
27
Nowadays, while observers, who do not observe much nor
understand much, indulge in listing all the defects of democracy and the lack of legitimacy of governments and politicians,
the main problem, i.e. the “hollowness” of democracy, goes unnoticed. Democracy has lost its soul, that is, social struggle. It
was social struggle that conferred sense and content to representation, to intermediaries. Nowadays, power has moved away
from democratic institutions, which have become empty containers, and it has been transferred elsewhere, in the hands of
a minority that governs global industrial and financial giants,
which in fact are not subjected to any general democratic rule
and are able to tame and even dictate the rules that concern
them directly. Social struggle has lost its traditional habitat, the
Fordist factory, and it has been fragmented into molecular movements that are incapable of developing a form of hegemony.
Work does not possess anymore the powerful leverage of socialisation which alimented the struggle. We are not dealing with
tendencies, we are talking about facts that have already happened and that leave us helpless and aphasic. We must turn back
and look again into society with eyes free from preconceptions
and already-rusty ideologies, perhaps with the help of some algorithms.
The change which we have just referred to is an event that
undermines at its roots the democratic covenant which, although in an increasingly unsatisfactory way, guaranteed the cohe28
sion of modern societies. If we want to be considerate, or even
just effective, this is the level at which we need to throw down
our political gauntlet of the present. We have to rewrite the
implicit and explicit social contract embedded in our constitutions, which does not include any control on economic power.
And there is no other way than pressuring and persuading governments to profit of this motion and to mobilize themselves
in the wake of a reform of fundamental laws in order to finally
put limits and restrictions to the acquisition and exercise of
economic power making it socially sustainable. If we cannot
change laws and institutions regulating our society, it will be
highly unlikely to harness the outrageous powers which threaten us.
The Constructionist fallacy
Unfortunately, there is one thing that correlates the innovative and healthily provocative attitude of the Accelerationist
Manifesto to the more pleonastic share of the Left, that is,
what I would define as the «constructionist fallacy», in the end
nothing but the aporia against which historically all Communist endeavours of any kind have collided. I am referring to
the indication that social realities can be modelled based on a
responsible project, regardless of its nature and of the approa29
ch through which we came to define it. If the idea that a sensible plan is capable of influencing significantly social evolution
could still have some plausibility when applied to small and sufficiently simple societies, it would be categorically impossible
to apply it to the complexity of global society. Unfortunately
for everybody, economic and social change advances based on
the interaction on a plethora of behaviours and choices, whose
effects are mostly unpredictable but in very general terms. Neither with high frequency monitoring. And what matters more
is that they are mainly uncontrollable.
For me this constitutes a decisive and irrevocable point. I
care deeply about it, and I consider it as a sort of point of Archimedes on which to found a new way of looking at social development, which uses the present as a lever to raise the future
up at the level of our eyes. I believe that it will be impossible
to pursue new collective plans of social action without gaining,
through analysis, a full understanding of which factors contribute to determine social development and, more generally, of
how the metabolism of society functions. There are structures,
behaviours, values, which to a great extent are the result of
an infinity of actions repeated and embedded in any kind of
project. I think that a sort of social DNA exists, one which mutates slowly and imperceptibly only according to deviations from
the norm selected and upheld by time and experience. This
was, and perhaps still is, a task that pertains to social conflict.
30
Sometimes their adjustment takes the form of a general crisis,
which deeply shakes the pillars that support and safeguard the
reproduction of society avoiding self-destructive impulses, which yet exist and, at times, disclose themselves.
The authors of the Manifesto appear to be aware, at least
partially, of such issue, to the extent that in 3.21 (MANIFESTO:
on the future) they explicitly declare that “whilst we cannot predict the precise result of our actions, we can determine probabilistically likely ranges of outcomes.” The problem is that
afterwards they do not unwind all the implications that, from
this consideration, inevitably reverberate themselves onto the
whole structure of their discourse.
The plans through which smaller or bigger groups of persons pursue precise social change goals constitute only one of
the factors at play, and often not even the most relevant, neither when they involve big slices of the population. They can
certainly trigger shifts, sediment new values, new practices, new
rules, but, even then, they go beyond if not against what the
original plan explicitly envisaged. The heterogenesis of goals is
one of the systemic characteristics of the social world in which
we are immersed. The most famous and surprising example is
probably the one illustrated by Adam Smith under the label of
“invisible hand”. It represents a status quo hardly acceptable by
a homo faber that has managed to domesticate nature but fails to
domesticate the society where he lives.
31
Everyday life in a society is constituted by a myriad of individual decisions and choices that implicate a temporal and
spatial integration between its members and a more or less extensive cooperation, being it explicit or implicit. Only a minimum part of such decisions and choices is the result of a prior
agreement between the individuals involved and even a smaller
part comes from a shared plan aimed at reaching clear goals.
All these decisions and choices are made, firstly, in a context characterised mainly by foregoing and assimilated rules,
and only to a minimum extent by rules resulting from developments and transformations, and, secondly, under the stress of
incentives and disincentives that these rules generate.
In every society, the system of rules, which we must say is
almost never entirely coherent, is crucial, as crucial is the way
in which rules are enforced and equally crucial is the extent
to which these are spontaneously respected as well as inversely
the amount of people that does not respect them. The influence that individuals, alone or in partnership, are able to exercise
on the process of development and enactment of rules measures precisely the amount of power that each person possesses
in order to play a part in determining the destinies of society. It
is clear that a single individual, especially if isolated, holds only
an infinitesimal, if not null, power of influence, while the bulk
of power is placed in the hands of those who are institutionally
32
charged with crafting and administering the rules, as well as in
the hands of those who find themselves endowed with a huge
power of influence for non-institutional reasons, as in the case
of managers of gigantic economic and financial enterprises
that dominate the global stage. The game for power, where
destinies of society are decided, is played by these actors. At the
moment, the outcome of the match, at least in the short term,
is marked.
The constructionist fallacy hides itself in the most unthinkable places. “We can make capitalism work for most of us rather than for only a relative handful” (Reich 2015, 21). “We
believe that any post-capitalism will require post-capitalist planning” (#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics,
3.8: on the future). “A new economic paradigm is rising” (Rifkin
2014). In cultural contexts very distant one from another but
with similar emphases, this is the myth of Faustian origin that
hovers among the rows of a kind of Left which, well aware of
the tragic defeats of the twentieth century, has abandoned the
perspective of a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and is
now looking for a more realistic and persuasive objective, but
still assumes of bearing the potential to “shepherd” society.
When I hear talking about “projects”, “programmes”, and
“planning” in the political and social sphere, I feel dismayed
and concerned, because I know how much history warns us
33
that every time a group of men, even if well-intentioned, aspire
to implement a project of social change, to plan a transformation of society, sooner or later, in front of an inevitably recalcitrant reality, the temptation of using some coercion arises, a
little violence to force reality to conform itself to the project.
The results are widely known. I believe that nobody intends
to repeat those facts, although many, sooner or later, will be
tempted to do so, oblivious to history and blinded by utopia.
We must find other ways.
The issue nowadays is not to devise another “receipt for
the cook-shops of the future”, borrowing the ironic words of a
well-known political activist of the XIX century. Western social
history is full of receipts. In the best of cases, they served to
establish the success of few intellectuals. Even Tronti agreed:
“To put the project of a future society before the analysis of the
present one is a bourgeois ideological flaw that only oppressed peasants and intellectual vanguards could possibly inherit”
(Workers and Capital, 1966).
34
The myth of acceleration
Let us now take into account what the use of the term “accelerationism” suggests. It would be a revolution that does not go
“against” the status quo, as all those conceived and attempted
until now, but rather “towards” it, “not to withdraw from the
process, but to go further, to ‘accelerate the process’”, as indicates one of the precursors of Accelerationism (Deleuze and
Guattari 1975, 272). We are dealing with a proactive revolution
with respect to the status quo that it intends to change. Assuming that we can call it ‘revolution’, and that there really is a
revolution, as Deleuze and Guattari were wondering, rightly
alleging some uncertainty. A touch of caution that the Accelerationists have boldly set aside.
Accelerationism seems to be more a section of aesthetics, in
the wake of the myth of velocity promoted by Italian Futurism,
rather than a new political perspective. This brings to our mind
the words that Walter Benjamin used to condemn futurism as
“the introduction of aesthetics into political life”, words which
were then recollected by a stern critic of accelerationism (Noys
2014, 17), especially when he argues that there is a “discrepancy between the existence of powerful means of production and
their insufficient usage in the process of production”, which
manifests itself through unemployment and the lack of market
outlets and which conceives imperialistic war as a “rebellion of
35
technology” (Benjamin 1966, 48). Obviously, I do not want to
argue that this is the direction in which Accelerationism is moving, at least in its Leftist component, but I find pretty evident
that it is founded on a similar idealization of technology, and
of the process accelerations that it generates. The metaphor
of the amusement park, in which Benjamin saw a sort of antidote to a possible technological intoxication of society, is at
the same time the projection of the experience of velocity to
which humanity is bound to give in. However, he still counted
on Communism and on the power of the proletariat.
In the end, the Accelerationist call to “the productive forces
of technology”, to the necessity “to unleash latent productive
forces”, “to accelerate the process of technological evolution”,
as “a springboard to launch towards post-capitalism”, bears a
markedly ideological inflection, certainly not a factual one.
The unwavering certainty of being able to bend the technological outcomes of capitalist development in favour of alternative social employments is not founded on any analysis of
real aspects of the world pre-existent to artificially intelligent
machines, nor it considers the unprecedented issues that this
brings with respect to the possible subversion of the relationship between man and machine. Once again, this brings to our
mind a remote but significant episode, rightfully recalled by
Noys too (2014, 27), that is, the Leninist dream of a “proletarian Taylorism” which by boosting productivity would have
36
freed time for workers to participate in the construction of the
new socialist regime. We know what happened. But we are also
aware that it could not have gone differently, because innovation, being it capitalistic, organizational or technological, bears
the signs of the context in which it has been conceived and of
the purposes which must serve. Today we are facing scientific
and technological innovations that replace lively labour at an
accelerated pace and on a scale never seen before. We should
rejoice of that, instead we are busy searching for ways to avoid
that this “freed” labour turns itself directly into useless labour,
that is, unemployed workforce. This is a terrible issue, which,
I fear, we cannot even attempt to solve unless we radically question the procedures that regulate at present the distribution
(and redistribution) of income and wealth. The Communist
utopia of a society that governs technology and machines has
not changed. Nonetheless, this is a gauntlet that must be taken
up, albeit not with the optimism of the mentality that animates
the Accelerationists. The mounting wave of techno-science originated by capitalism is contentious, and it is possible to force
it, within certain limits, to break on other shores, generating
dynamics that today seem unthinkable.
Accelerationists obviously stress the profound mutations
that scientific and technological development is causing, particularly in the field of labour. Captured by the growth of the
Marxian general intellect, they do not seem to notice that the
37
critical fault line which splits the global labour market is not
the historical Fordist one between material and intellectual
work, but the one between routine and non-routine work. To
the growth and management of the general intellect, what matters is the relatively small sub-group of non-routine and highly
qualified intellectual labour, which represents slightly more
than 18% of the whole workforce. More generally, in the United States routine jobs represented about 60% of employment
but in the mid-seventies they dropped to 40%, while the opposite was true for non-routine jobs. This proves us that the notion of “cognitive-cultural capitalism”, although it understands
one of the aspects that characterise nowadays the evolution of
global capitalism, seems extremely incomplete and reductive
with respect to the actual overall economic situation. Capitalism continues to be a very complex and diverse being, in which
very different economic dimensions and social relationships
cohabit and clash. There coexist stratified capitalist entities,
generated by different seasons and characterised by different
dynamics. The physical and social space that capitalism inhabits is not homogenous, it is affected by internal conflicts. Capitalism is always at war with itself, and is condemned to that
struggle that Sisyphus experienced, that is, a process of creative
destruction which determines its incoercible dynamism. From
this process new capitalistic entities continue to emerge, and
enter into conflict with pre-existing ones. The tune is given by
scientific and technological innovation which constantly remo38
dels the software embedded in those processes of production
and, more generally, in those economic process through which
the reproduction of society expresses itself. “Cognitive-cultural
capitalism”, if we want to use this term, simply refers to the last
manifestation of the endless process of creative destruction that
has taken over the top of global capitalism. Its most prominent
feature is an increasingly extensive and intensive application of
knowledge to financial and production processes. To confuse
one part with the whole lot and to extend the definition of
“cognitive-cultural capitalism” to present capitalism as a whole
means to loose track of the contradictions that characterise it,
the lines of flight that continue to be drawn, creating room
for change that risks to remain unnoticed. “Cognitive-cultural
capitalism” defines the leading tendency, the force that demolishes and at the same time rebuilds, but it does not necessarily
describe the capitalism of the future. To bet on the possibility
of domesticating such tendency and to turn it against capitalism itself is an illusion that can only help perpetuating the Left’s
irrelevance. The Accelerationist hypothesis will hold or fall depending on this bet. The impression I get is that Accelerationists are underestimating, perhaps deliberately, the robustness
and even the inseparability of the link that connects scientific
and technological development to capitalism, and that they are
unaware of how powerful are the incentives embedded in market economy. On these incentives we should operate.
39
To conclude, in general it seems to me that the only interesting and promising aspect of the Accelerationist approach
is the proposal, certainly innovative with respect to the ideology of the Left as a whole, to try to place ourselves not just
“against”, but mainly “within” the processes of transformation
induced by technological development. We should move in the
wake of those innovations produced by capitalistic companies
and try to deviate their course, to alter their digits. It is not a totally new idea. It is the same idea that Tronti adopted many years ago in the introduction of Workers and Capital, that says that,
“the weapons used for proletarian uprisings have always been
taken from the armoury of their superiors”. However, in the
Accelerationist proposal of accelerating the present processes
to go and storm the future the “constructionist fallacy”, as I
called it, appears, that is, the idea that we can deliberately accelerate and govern social processes towards a previously and arbitrarily chosen destination. We remain closed in the asphyxiating kitchen of the future. The present, with its opportunities,
its fractures and its circumstances, remains outside the door.
The key to our era is without any doubt “Moore’s law”, that
is, the accomplishment of the acceleration that characterises
the way in which technology and science, through their innovations, enter our lives modifying our rhythms and contents,
and remodelling our society. Hence, Accelerationism identifies
well one of the most prominent factors of our mutual destiny,
40
but, I think, it is unable to grasp the intimate mechanism of the
acceleration underway, which is the exponential accumulation
that we see in the power of data elaboration of a microchip or
in the amount of data stocked in digital format. These are the
phenomena subverting the foundations of our civilization, and
not technological acceleration per se, which reappears more
or less regularly in the course of economic development. All
this happens under the tight control of the intrinsic incentives
of capitalism and under a regime of substantial randomness, in
the sense that nobody makes plans or guides it towards a definite destination. A new alteration of the human species is probably emerging, the homo informaticus, a man that feeds himself
with information and releases information in the environment
where he lives. We must clear that this IT dimension has always
existed in the life of the homo sapiens, but up until the digital
revolution the amount of information that the individual was
able to process was averagely much smaller and, more importantly, static, while the information that he voluntarily or involuntarily released in his environment used to get completely
lost. Nowadays, any individual, provided with the most common
computer instruments, is able to tap an enormous amount of
information, and he can process it for the most disparate reasons. But, what is most important and surprising, is that a rapidly growing proportion of the information that we input into
our environment simply by interacting with our counterparts
is stored away and made available for the most unthinkable
41
purposes. These are the famous big data, which are invading
and revolutionising the digital environment by which our lives
are already absorbed. For better or for worse, our lives will be
increasingly influenced by the manipulation of these gigantic
databases. They will be used to deliver us services that we cannot even imagine today, or to radically transform the fruition
of existing ones, but they could be also used to make increasingly insignificant our choices, which will be anticipated by an artificial intelligence capable of read through our daily routines,
such as the automated fast food which already knows what our
favourite breakfast is and delivers it to our table after expressly
making it. Or like the robotic doctor, which will have stored all
the information regarding our health and will be able to make
an extremely precise diagnosis by confronting our symptoms
with the ones stored in his immense database. Today, already,
governments attempt to monitor with prehistoric equipment
the factors that determine our perception of happiness in
order to conform their policies in real time. Today, already,
experimental psychology pretends to be able to identify which
background elements are capable of morbidly nudging individuals to make choices that governments believe to be more
appropriate. It is convenient, though scary, to imagine the scenario that will materialise when these policies become ready to
take advantage of the systematic elaboration of huge databases.
Moreover, at the moment the greatest global enterprises are the
ones which gather and explore the big data. Who will be respon42
sible for making decisions about the access to these data and
their use? Additionally, are we facing the emerging of a new and
tragic gap between those who hold and have access to big data
and those who do not?
On the background it appears the possibility that another
characteristic of the homo informaticus might emerge, a potentially more shocking one. The millenary predisposition of human
beings to associate themselves in groups might get transformed
into a compulsive inclination to connect themselves with their
counterparts through the Internet, subverting the universal meaning of living in a society. In such a way we would assist to the
crush of society that has been matured in the thirty-years period
in which a crook individualism accompanied and favoured the
assertion of the neo-liberalist project. It would be the burial of
the famous and notorious sentence pronounced by Margaret
Thatcher: “Who is society? There is no such a thing! There are
individual men and women”. A society made of interconnected
individuals, searching for lost reasons to spend time together.
Once again, I think that these are some of the most relevant
issues posed by the exponential acceleration of information technology, in a world where velocity has imposed itself on human
behaviours overwhelming their rhythm. However, these issues
remain unnoticed and underestimated by Accelerationism.
43
Another fallacy is hidden, in my opinion, in the creases
of the argument on the “revolutionary vanguard” that intellectually anticipates and materially guides the people, but we
will discuss it another time. I care only to mention some food
for thought. Could the “revolutionary vanguard” be reappearing disguised as the “super-humans of the future” or as the
“Übermensch”, recalling a Nietzschean suggestion revamped
years ago by Deleuze and Guattari in a pretty obscure text, which seems to be dear to many Accelerationists that deem it as
the foundation of their standpoint? Should we not have doubts
on the compatibility of this “line of flight” with the democratic
aspirations that we still have? Given that we are in a Nietzschean context, it inevitably comes to my mind that passage from
Beyond Good and Evil in which Nietzsche explicitly contrasts the
“humans of the future”, the “new philosophers”, the “rulers”,
with democracy, conceived as a form of decay of political organisation and human degradation. We must not trivialise these
topics, they are relevant, but I notice here more of a bundle of
issues rather than a hint to a solution.
44
Footnotes on velocity and acceleration.
To stress on acceleration, as accelerationists do, is somehow
misleading, because it tempts to ignore the “quality” of processes generated by scientific and technological development.
In the end, economic development, since it is founded on innovation, has always been “accelerationist”. Some form of Moore’s law has always been operating there. So that is not the
point. Actually, the most decisive and distinctive aspect of the
present moment seems to be the velocity that scientific and technological progress allows to reach in certain fields associated
with data elaboration, lending to them an absolutely new and
shocking outlook and locating them outside human capacity. It
creates an artificial world in which, for the first time on such a
vast scale, humans are not in control anymore, but instead they
are dependent on the machines that they have created. This
would mean an explosive development, which could constitute
“the greatest event of human history”, but it could also be the
last one, according to the dramatic warning issued in 2014 by
a group of very qualified scientists (Stephen Hawking, Stuart
Russell, Max Tegmart and Frank Wilczek).
“Technological singularity” is near, wrote in 2005 the controversial American futurologist, computer scientist and writer Raymond Kurzweil, meaning that we are getting closer to
the moment in which technological progress will allow the
45
creation of a form of intelligence superior to the human one,
which will determine the end of human race. In 1993 Vernor
Vinge, another controversial American sci-fi writer, as well as
mathematician and computer scientist, had already written on
the same topic that “we are on the edge of a change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.” Experience teaches
us that futurologists’ forecasts are written on the sand, but the
technological trajectory marked by the quite cryptic haven of
singularity seems at least plausible, and anyway it warns us that
we are moving towards a threshold beyond which there is a
truly unknown future. For the first time in its millennial history,
humanity would find itself deprived of what characterised its
evolution the most, that is, the progressive appropriation of
wisdom and the growing control, mediated by technology, over
the environment where it lives. This perspective seems in contrast with what goes under the label of Anthropocene, but instead it could weld itself well to it. In both cases, at the moment
we do not hold the necessary cultural or political instruments
to face it. And certainly we will not receive them from the naïve
Accelerationist fantasy.
46
A negative acceleration: digression on labour
In the United States the third millennium opened with a decade in which new jobs were created. It had never happened.
The forgoing decades had always brought an average 20% rise
in unemployment. And there is more. Between 1998 and 2013,
the number of hours worked in the private sector remained
substantially steady at 194 billion. In the meantime, population
grew by 40 million people, output from the same group of firms
rose by 42%. Economic inequality has been constantly growing
too, reaching levels that we saw last in the 1920s. Labour, after
the splendour of the thirty post-war years, has become a problem again. Nowadays that is the key issue. and, as always, society, and not capitalism, is expected to find a solution.
Let us try to schematise. We call labour the activity through which humans create the conditions that allow the survival
of them and their race. There has been, at the dawn of time,
an age in which labour was immediately available for an individual. Even in complete loneliness, he knew what he had to
do to procure himself food and to protect himself from dangers and adversities, and he used to employ all his energy to
do so. The payback was, indeed, survival and the possibility of
reproducing himself. Since mankind started to live in society,
work has become a social activity, mediated by social relationships. Work does not rest anymore in the direct and immediate
47
availability of the single person, but it is subject to some form
of social cooperation, and it requires the individual to relate
himself to other human beings and to subject himself to rules imposed by these forms of cooperation. Labour becomes
the cornerstone and the foundation of the individual’s social
being, and at the same time it makes him dependent on the
social relations within which his working activity takes place.
Men now depend on labour, their subsistence depends on labour. The economic evolution of society, or more precisely the
evolution of the economic conditions that make social reproduction possible, identifies itself mainly with the evolution of
the conditions that regulate access to work and the way in which it is executed. The process has gone through several steps,
all marked in particular by economic development. But this is
not the place to review them.
Today we know that one of the main factors that affect the
possibility of accessing a job is the degree and quality of the
competences we possess. This is the factor that increasingly influences the structure of the labour market and affects the jobs’
ranking, which in turn determines which jobs are available at a
certain degree of skills. The labour market at the global level is
struck nowadays by two forces, two tendency pressures, which
greatly influence its structure. On the one hand, there is the
huge thrust of globalisation, which is causing a coerced, and
painful, reallocation of the global workforce, driven by the pri48
ce differential of labour in different economic areas of the world. National and regional labour markets can be represented as
a gigantic system of communicating vessels where an arduous
realignment of wages is underway, which takes time and causes
significant social disruptions. In the Chinese industrial labour
market salaries rose by 10% every year between 2000 and 2005,
and by averagely 10% between 2005 and 2010, while the Chinese government has set the target of a minimum wage growth of
13% until 2015. Such process has an end, although not exactly
a foreseeable one, which will virtually be the creation of a single global labour market. This will not last, like any productive
and distributive arrangement under a capitalistic regime. But
this is not the path that we are taking.
On the other hand, there is the ever more powerful and
accelerated thrust of technological innovation which absorbs into its production processes vast and growing amounts of
knowledge. Productive tasks are increasingly entrusted to algorithms that do not need human interference but at the moment of their planning (for now at least). They are not just
material tasks, which imply physical action, but also abstract
operations, which imply intellectual activity. Human labour, in
both its forms of expression, physical and intellectual, is more
and more efficiently replaced by the work of machines, with
exponential cost reductions. Machines become progressively
more “rational” and men only have to assist them. For now,
49
they only think about what they are ordered to think about,
through algorithms that substitute specific thinking steps. But
the moment in which they will become autonomous even in
their reasoning, in the sense that they will be able to build new
algorithms by themselves, is not far away.
The world imagined by Marx and then by Keynes, a world
where most of the work intended to the reproduction of men
and society is done by machines, and where men see the time
they have to dedicate to their job drastically reduced, is getting
dangerously nearer. Dangerously because, on the contrary,
we perceive as extremely distant – we cannot visualise them –
institutions able to govern a world where the necessary work
time is severely reduced, and potentially nullified, but where
paradoxically men’s ability to secure means of subsistence and
all that offered by an immense production apparatus is attached exactly to the necessary work. And this paradox generates
another one, even more terrible, that is, the time freed does
not bear any freedom, but only an increase in needs. The more
scientific and technological development instilled in the regime of these machines frees human lifetime from the burden of
work, the poorer men will get.
The potential implications are at the same time disturbing
and intriguing, depending on the kind of “philosophy” that we
follow. If the need of using human labour for the production
50
of goods and services defaults, then the fundamental mechanism that allocates purchasing power, which in turn constitutes the basic requirement for the existence and functioning of
those institutions peculiar of our society, i.e. markets, will also
default. This would create a paradoxical short circuit. In front
of a mounting technical possibility of producing goods and
services in virtually unlimited quantities, there would not be
anymore the necessary instruments to distribute them to those
who need or want them. Once again, we must acknowledge
that new scenarios are emerging, ones in front of which we are
completely helpless.
Nowadays we are facing a production system that is increasingly permeated and influenced by the relentless acceleration
of digital technology, and that presents two potentially harmful
features. On the one hand, the fact that property of accumulated technological capital finishes in the hands of a small group
of people, who seize also the profits that it generates. On the
other hand, the rising economic inequality which is dividing
society ever more boldly, dissolving its core that has been so far
the basement and stronghold of democracy. White-collar workers, who for better or for worse marked the history of twentieth-century democracies, seems to be disappearing since it
was made obsolete by the superior “intellect” of machines. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, cognitive computing, and
genetic programming are literally engulfing the informational
51
content of many jobs, hollowing individuals’ professional assets out, especially those based on knowledge. What is scary is
that machines manage such knowledge much better than how
human beings managed it so far. Another daunting aspect is
that the elaboration capacity of these machines is available, at
present, to very few people. Accelerationism seems to be aware
of these matters, but it does not have anything relevant to say
about them.
It is clear that our society is helpless in facing these courses of technological and, primarily, cognitive overturning; its
institutional apparatus, or if you prefer its software, is completely inadequate to tackle the impending issues. There is a need
for shaping new values and institutions capable of absorbing
into the social metabolism these volatile innovations. The key
question might be: what can be done so that the working time
released by the advent of smart machines does not fade into
unemployment, but becomes vacant time returned to everyone’s life? The question is not new, but rather standard. However, it has remained unanswered. Hic Rhodus, hic saltus. Those
who truly want to tackle the focal issue at the dusk of the modern era need to find an answer to this question. Supposing
that it could be possible to deliberately accelerate the process
of innovation that is driving us here, the solution would not be
acceleration itself. The answer is hidden in the deep mystery
of those impulses that once in a while induce human being
52
to research new forms of cooperation, thereby generating new
social institutions. However, nowadays we live in dark times:
forms of cooperation are dangerously crumbling, lifting that
veil of trust that has bonded our societies so far. Beside the one
celebrated by the Accelerationists, there is even here a gradual
acceleration underway, which entails destructive processes that
are closing our future down rather than opening it.
The world that we are facing bears a great resemblance to
the one envisioned more than sixty years ago by a brilliant
twenty-nine-year-old American writer, Kurt Vonnegut. A world
where machines dominate and men are divided into two categories based on a sort of IQ: those who deal with machines,
namely the dominant class, and those who have been expropriated of their intellect and ability to work by machines and
now live in lousy subsistence conditions. The truly pertinent
question could then be not “What to do”, but “Why in sixty
years we haven’t managed to do anything?” In the period of highest Fordist acceleration, Ford himself identified and solved
the matter, doubling the wage of his employees so that they
could buy the cars produced by his assembly lines. Who will
play Ford’s role today?
Actually, the problem is much more complex. As often happens for matters that concern society, there are two answers: a
maximal and a minimal one. There is a founded suspicion that,
53
provided that some sufficiently general action is taken shortly,
the solution to prevail will be the minimal one. The maximal
solution would imply that we addressed the problem of how
ought to be governed a society in which scientific and technological development is shrinking the role of direct human labour to a negligible percentage. The new and ground-breaking
circumstance, which we are facing due to a new wave of technological innovations, is that the myth of the liberation of men
from the yoke of labour and physical fatigue is basically coming
true. We are getting asymptotically nearer to the moment when
all the labour necessary for the material reproduction of humanity could be done by systems of machines. Common wealth
would not be represented anymore by the sum of all goods and
services made available and by the corresponding size of the
transactions necessary to purchase them, but by the amount
of free time. The problem is: based on which criteria, through
which institutions, we could determine the allocation of the
total amount of free time? Even on this topic, there are many
suggestions that come from a similar area of thought, which
goes under the labels of citizen’s dividend or quantitative easing for people. However, these do not seem to fit the kind of
hypotheses and solutions achievable in the short term.
The minimal solution would consist in the adoption of one
of the many measures aimed at assigning a minimum wage
to all those who, for one reason or another, do not manage
54
to earn it on the market, or, in a more extensive version, to
everyone indistinctly. The side effects of these two versions of
minimal solution are widely known and debated. Apart from
all the considerations on their possible impact on the system
of incentives that governs human choices, I am going to mention here only one general consequence, which sums up all the
others: each one of these solutions would imply a more or less
extensive socialisation of wealth. And this is an issue to which,
up to now, nobody has found a non-utopian answer.
This is not the place to discuss this matter. For now, I am
going to simply restate that the creation of an acceptable social
and economic order will have to come across this issue and will
have to come to terms with the unsustainable and devastating
drifts on which the crisis of the last few years has shed light.
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Biography
Lapo Berti
An Italian economist and former member of the Italian
Antitrust Authority (1993—2010), Berti was Professor of Economic and Financial Politics at the University of Cosenza. His
practice looked at problems of monetary theory and the history of economic thought, as well as economic politics. During the 1960s he collaborated with Mario Tronti and other
Marxist intellectuals within Italian Communist heresy defined
as “workerism”. In the 1970s he co-edited with Sergio Bologna
the Marxist magazine Primo Maggio. Most recently he published
Il mercato oltre le ideologie (Università Bocconi Editore, 2006), Le
stagioni dell’antitrust (with Andrea Pezzoli, Università Bocconi
Editore, 2010), Trattatello sulla felicità (LUISS University Press,
2013) and, with others, Birth of Digital Populism (Obsolete Capitalism Free Press, 2014) and Money, revolution and philosophy
of the future (Obsolete Capitalism Free Press, 2017). In 2016
Rizosfera published Berti’s interview Marx, Money and Capital
(Rhizonomics book series).
56