We share an interview with Franco “Bifo” Berardi, conducted by Pedro Rios for the Portuguese newspaper, Público (01/08/2025).
And as a complement to this interview, we also share below a video recording of an interview with “Bifo” for Zer0 Books and Repeater Media, from 2024.
Known as “Bifo” since his youth, the Italian Franco Berardi has been a reference of leftwing thought over the last decades. In May of 1968, he participated in the student revolt of the University of Bologna. He would be part of the extra-parliamentary group Potere Operaio, next to figures such as “Toni” Negri. During those years of rebellious agitation, he founded the magazine A/traverse and he was involved in the pirate radio station, Alice. In his books, Berardi leaves the stalls of more orthodox Marxism, calling on, for example, the teachings and concepts of psychoanalysis for his criticism of post-industrial capitalist society.
His last book, Disertate (2023), identifies in the “wave” of depression among the young a symptom of a world of excessive work and in a climate crisis. In the face of the chaos and the pain, the response of these young people is “desertion”, a withdrawal, a giving up, as if joy could only be found amidst “ruins”, according to “Bifo”.
Yes, Franco Berardi, today 75 years old, has lost hope. We wanted to speak to him with the pretext of the recent Portuguese edition of Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility (2017). In that book …, the philosopher had already made a sombre diagnosis of life informed by capitalism, but he still believed that it would be possible to open a path of flight. How? “By creating a common consciousness and a common technical platform for the world’s cognitive workers.” It was the intellectual workers (artists, engineers, scientists) who set up the machine; it was now up to them “to re-programme” the great world machine for collective wellbeing.
Almost ten years after writing these words, Franco Berardi’s hope faded away.
Futurability ends with an appeal to cognitive workers. There was some hope in that book, but you have already advised me that you lost it. Why?
Futurability was, in a certain way, my last book to propose the possibility of an alternative. It was before the pandemic, before the illusion that the pandemic gave us and before the return of genocide to the history of the world.
I know that what I have to say opens no perspective, but I have to choose between lying, affirming something in which I do not believe, and telling the truth. And the truth is, in brief, this: human experience came to an end.
What is human experience?
It is the idea, crucial to modernity, that the world, language, reason and law can control the immediacy of instinct, of bestiality. The victims have to become assassins – this is the lesson that I learned with the transformation of Israel into a Nazi entity. This is the lesson that I learn when I see Auschwitz on the beaches of the Mediterranean, on the coast of Gaza and in hundreds of concentration camps in the Mediterranean basin.
What makes the horror of Gaza something different from other conflicts?
50 years ago, when I was 25 years old, I witnessed a dirty war that was like a genocide, in Vietnam. However, at that moment, we had the perception that the Vietnam War was the beginning of a possible future. When the Viet Cong were able to defeat the aggressors, we had the perception of a new possibility … We were mistaken. The Viet Cong were not a hope for humanity. But we, like millions of people, saw there a future possibility.
Now, the true novelty is that the new generation is conscious of the fact that genocide rules over the world in which we live today. When we look at Gaza, we are looking at the symbol of a genocide that is taking place everywhere, along the border between the North and South of the world, from Myanmar to the Sudan and the Mediterranean Sea, where every day migrants are killed by the fascists of Italy.
In Futurability you defended the idea that there were other possible futures, inscribed in current reality, susceptible to being unblocked. Is it not dangerous to abandon hope, as you are doing now?
Futurability had to do with a materialist analysis of work and social activity. For this reason, in the last part, despite Donald Trump’s victory, despite “Brexit”, there was a possibility. A possibility, not a hope: the possibility of solidarity between cognitive workers to create a common terrain of transformation.
This idea was present in the Occupy movement of 2011, and was in the 1968 movement, a movement of intellectual workers against imperialism and capitalism.
The pandemic accelerated a tendency that was already inscribed in the history of the new generation: solitude, social distancing, fear of the other’s body. This is the anthropological and psychological transformation that rendered solidarity impossible. When we came out of the pandemic, we discovered that our solitude was definitive. Solitude is the determining characteristic of the life of the digital generation.
I have worked particularly with young people, students, activists, people who speak to me for psychoanalytic reasons, and what I discover is that, for them, solitude is their future. There is nothing that allows for imagining solidarity in the future. It is for this reason that I say that human experience has come to an end.
You are quite right in saying that my affirmation cancels out the possibility of hope for the future. But I answer: hope now is dangerous. What is important is that we be conscious of the fact that we have no possibility of being human in the future. Therefore, what should we do? My last book is entitled Disertate [Quit Everthing, 2024]. Quit everything; abandon; go away; stop procreating: this is the true politics for the future.
And yet, over the last years, we have witnessed a few movements of reaction. We saw, for example, young people adhering to “digital Sabbaths”, a day per week with little or no use of digital technologies. And things like the series Adolescence and Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation, provoked significant debates. Is there not a greater awareness of the effects of the technology on our lives, including that of young people?
Yes, but it is too late. The issue is that no cultural campaign, no psychological therapy, can change the basic programming of the mind. A generation that learned more words from a machine than from their mother cannot be “re-educated”, cannot be “cured”. One cannot help an adolescent leave the digital prison because it is the only world they know, because their mind was formatted according to this kind of stimulus, according to this paradigm.
You argue that technology and the growing automatisms (from the economy to politics) that govern contemporary life contribute to what you call the “era of impotence”. How can we exit it?
Impotence is the defining characteristic of global political life over the last decades.
The political defeat of the left, of the workers, is essentially tied to the automatic relationship between finance and society. Just look at what happened in Greece in 2015. In that book [Futurability], I speak a great deal about Greece. 61% of the Greek population voted against the financial memorandum [rescue]. But in the end, Alexis Tsipras was obliged to cede because it was impossible, because the financial automatism totally destroyed democracy. Democracy is a farce and something non-existent when finance dictates the political and economic decisions of governments.
Today, we are impotent intellectually, sexually, politically. Our power is the atomic bomb. Our power is the concentration of technology and weapons.
Your first book is entitled Contro il lavoro (1970), that is, against work. You believed then that technology would be an ally of the human being – it would permit, for example, liberation from work. What went wrong?
Many things went wrong. The first wrong thing – very wrong – is the so-called left. Instead of social autonomy, the focus of the revolutionaries was always political power. Technology in itself is but a possibility, but the left completely misinterpreted the function and the potential of technology. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the communists reduced technology to a mere tool.
In the last 50 years, the years of the electronic and digital transformation, the labour unions considered technology as an enemy, rather than thinking of it as a possibility.
When we said “refuse work”, it was a way of saying: let us accept the technological change and, simultaneously, let us struggle for the reduction of work time. The unions and the left in general said something different: it is necessary to defend jobs against technology.
Until now, artificial intelligence did not lead to a reduction in work hours. In 1928, the British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote a short essay, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”, in which he imagined how the world would be in a century’s time. Keynes wrote that in 2028, the patterns of life would have so improved that it would be possible to work only three hours per day. It’s obvious: automation did not give us this world.
The opposite happened: today, people work more for less money. I maintain the idea that automation could be an opportunity to reduce work. It was transformed into an instrument to increase profits, increase military power and expand useless consumption.
The problem is not technology, but the anthropological and cultural incapacity to redefine social objectives, social aspirations. Frugality however was never considered by the labour movement.
You often speak of depression, applying the clinical concept to the whole of capitalist society.
The psychiatrists say that young people are depressed. This is true from the perspective of psychiatric symptomology. But I think that there is something more to understand here: young people are seeing the truth.
James Hillman, an important psychologist, said that depression is the closest point to truth, the truth of death and of human fragility. Accordingly, depression should not be understood simply from the point of view of pathology. It is obvious that I recognise that there is an enormous therapeutic problem, but there is another level of understanding of depression. Depression is a form of knowing, of understanding. Young people look at the present, look towards the future and they understand that there is no human future. There is no love, there is no sex, there is no pleasure, there is no respect, there is no breathable air. How can they then not be depressed? I do not call this depression, I call it desertion. Desertion is the understanding that there is no exit and that the only thing that we can do is to live in solidarity in the face of the extinction of the human species.
But cannot something positive arise from this desertion?
I hope that there is a culture of joy among the deserters. We are obliged to desert. We are obliged to abandon the word “war”, the word “bestiality”. This generation has the right to think of their life joyfully. My present is happy because I know that I owe nothing to humanity. Humanity came to an end, but I am still alive.
I will continue to try to insert some hope in this conversation …
… forgive me. [laughter]
The election of Barak Obama, in 2008, gave you some encouragement. And the success of Zohran Mamdani, who won the democratic primaries in New York, and the popularity of someone like Bernie Sanders, in a country where it was almost taboo to speak of socialism?
I believe that all efforts to create spaces of humanity should be greeted as positive. I love Zohran Mamdani, but I know that he has no chance of success.
Over the last 10 or 15 years, we often hoped for something new from the left – in Greece, in 2015 with Jeremy Corbin, with Sanders. Well, this enthusiasm is good, I share it, but I am not an idiot, I know that we are defeated forever! The word “left” means nothing. That is the issue. I share the joy of being together against fascism. However, I know that I have to go beyond this temporary joy and create the conditions to depart from the agony of the human species. As a philosopher, my task is not to find a strategy; it is to understand. And what I understand is this: humanity will not survive this century. We have to create the conditions for joy and solidarity during the agony.