A few days ago I received an invitation from an American association to participate in a conference to be held in Chicago on 5, 6 and 7 April. The theme of the convention is, “Is there a left in the 21st century?” I quickly replied:
“Unfortunately, my health is so precarious that I cannot make the trip to Chicago. So I will not be able to be with you in person. However, I will write a text and publish it before April so that you can read my reflections if you are interested in my views. Thank you for the invitation.”
Frankly (beyond my physical frailty), I have no desire to go to the United States, to that terrifying country where a mafia of aggressive racists rules over a population of unhappy individuals living in a frenzied competition for survival.
However, the question to be discussed at the convention is a good starting point for a much-needed reflection on the future (or non-future) of social subjectivity in this century. Here is my response.
Algorithms, facial recognition, and tightening protest laws signal a deepening surveillance state
by Blade Runner
The UK is expanding its use of predictive policing and surveillance, framing it as a response to crime, protest, and public safety. But the direction is clear: more monitoring, earlier intervention, and more control over dissent.
In early April, The Guardian revealed that the Ministry of Justice is developing a “murder prevention” system. The tool aims to identify individuals judged to be at high risk of committing lethal violence, based on data drawn from multiple agencies—social care, policing, education. The government has framed the project as a research initiative to improve risk assessments and early intervention. But its underlying logic marks a shift toward ‘precrime’—managing individuals on the basis of what they might do, rather than what they’ve done.
Members of the Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, in Portuguese, or MST) in Brazil participate in a tree planting. Photo by Mykesio Max / Courtesy of MST
Imagining an anarchist-ecological possibility from our shared, collective past, with Peter Gelderloos.
The mainstream climate framework is utterly failing to solve the climate crisis. What could a real solution look like?
In one way of measuring it, the mainstream framework to address the climate crisis has been a huge success. Promoting green energy, electric vehicles, conservation zones, carbon credits, carbon capture, and other new technologies has made billions of dollars for companies like Tesla, Google, NextEra Energy, British Petroleum, Saudi Aramco, Tongwei Solar, McKinsey & Company, and BlackRock. Governments have gained power through increased interventions in economic planning, and authoritarian regimes from China and India to Canada and the U.S. now have a new justification to carry out land theft against Indigenous and rural populations. And millions more NGO directors, aid workers, diplomats, accountants, entrepreneurs, engineers, academics, and scientists get a hand-out in the form of high salary employment managing the crisis.
Why are we able to describe and analyse the old that is fading away, but we are unable to imagine the new? Perhaps because we believe, more or less unconsciously, that the new is something that arrives – we don’t know from where – after the end of the old. The inability to think the new is thus revealed in the imprudent use of the prefix ‘post’: the new is the post-modern, the post-human, in any case, something that comes after. The truth is precisely the opposite: the only way for us to think the new is to read it and decipher its hidden features in the forms of the old that passes away and dissolves. This is what Hölderlin clearly states in the extraordinary fragment on The Declining Fatherland, where the perception of the new is inseparable from the memory of the old that is sinking and whose figure, in fact, we must lovingly assume in some way. That which has served its time and which seems to dissolve loses its actuality, is emptied of its meaning and somehow becomes possible again. Benjamin suggests something similar when he writes that, in the instant of remembrance, the past, which seemed completed, shows itself to be incomplete and thus offers us the most precious gift: possibility. Truly new is only the possible: if it were already actual and effective, it would inevitably be destined to age and decay. And the possible does not come from the future, but is, in the past, that which was not, which perhaps will never be, but which could have been and which therefore concerns us. We perceive the new only when we are able to grasp the possibility that the past – that is, the only thing we have – offers us for an instant, before it disappears forever. It is in this way that we should refer to the Western culture that today, all around us, is unravelling and dissolving.
On 2 April, Donald Trump announced the imposition of sweeping tariffs on countries across the world, hitting allies and enemies alike with massive trade barriers, in what amounted to an outright assault on the ideology of free trade. A 34% tariff would be imposed on China, 20% on the European Union, 49% on Cambodia, 48% on Laos, 46% on Vietnam, and so on: figures devised according to a simplified mathematical formula, in which the US goods trade deficit with any given country was divided by the value of US imports for that country, and that number was then divided in half. The Wall Street Journal lamented that Trump was ‘blowing up the world trading system’ and reverting to the ‘old era of trade protectionism’. For the Financial Times it was ‘an astonishing act of self-harm’, which would ‘upend the global economic order and tarnish US prosperity’. Investors soon went into meltdown. Key stock indexes plunged and roughly $10 trillion worth of market value was erased.
Alleged gang members deported under Alien Enemies Act. In this photo provided by El Salvador’s presidential press office, prison guards transfer deportees from the U.S., alleged to be Venezuelan gang members, to the Terrorism Confinement Center in Tecoluca, El Salvador, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (El Salvador presidential press office via AP)
I’ve seen disposable razors on mountaintops outside San Diego. I’ve seen plaid flannel shirts caught on the branches of low trees, trembling in the breeze near Bisbee. I’ve watched a pink backpack tumble across the desert floor. I’ve saved sheriffs’ blotter reports; in one, ‘human remains recovered in the desert’ near Lukeville, Arizona, sounds as ordinary as a stolen car.
We publish an article by Yavor Tarinski, published in the Transnational Institute of Social Ecology (23/03/2025) and generously passed onto to us by the author, about recent protests in various Balkan countries and the centrality of peoples “assemblies” or “plenums” in these movements; “assemblies” that hark back at least to the 2014 protests in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and that point to the broader significance of “direct democracy” in movements for justice.
Today, plenums are talking about a new type of direct democracy.
We see that in different temporal and spatial realities, in moments of social upheaval, that societies begin to move and self-organize. There is a common trait that often connects such experiences – the emergence of grassroots institutions that allow for direct participation of the citizenry. These reflect what CLR James has termed as universal sentiment towards direct democracy.[2] Such democratic institutions emerged during the French Revolution in the form of sectionalassemblies[3], in the heyday of the Haitian Revolution as organs of thepeople[4], in the early stages of the Russian Revolution as soviets[5], throughout the Spanish Revolution in the shape of popular committees[6].
Lastivka is a Ukrainian activist, squatter, anarchist, feminist and samba musician-dancer. She joined the front in 2022 and is now the commander of a drone unit.
How the creation of autonomous, self-organised and horizontal communities has influenced the reality of armed resistance. Which missions have been the most difficult for them. What challenges the fighters face after 4 years of war. What Western activists need to be prepared for. Whether or not there is a gap between civilian and military spaces.
Mourners gather around the bodies of Palestinians who were killed by the Israeli army, at al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City on March 18, 2025 [Abdel Kareem Hana/AP]
Every house that the Israelis destroy, every life that they murder on a daily basis, and even every school day that they make the children of Palestine lose, take with them a part of the immense deposit of truth and wisdom that, in and for Western culture, was accumulated by the generations of the Diaspora, from the glorious or infamous misfortune of the ghettos, from the ferocity of persecutions old and new. A great Jewish Christian woman, Simone Weil, reminded us that the sword hurts on both sides. I dare add: it sometimes wounds on more than two sides. Each day of war against the Palestinians, or of false consciousness for the Israelis, means that a house, a memory, a parchment, a sentiment, a verse, a moulding, is imperceptibly humiliated and disappears from our lives and our homeland. A poet once spoke of the outlaw and his ‘calm and lofty gaze/ That damns a whole people around a scaffold’ [Baudelaire, “The Litanies of Satan”]: well, all around the ghettos of Gaza and the West Bank, every day the State of Israel risks a condemnation far more serious than that of the UN, a trial that will open within it, between it and itself, if it does not decide to get drunk as Babylon did before it.
Franco Lattes Fortini, “Letter to the Italian Jews”, lundimatin #467, (21/03/2025)
What is the power, or even usefulness of thought, before the physical violence of mass murder? Perhaps none in the end. But if that is so, then the end of human life should be openly desired, for we would be irredeemable.
We try, here, while acutely aware of the limitations of the exercise, to modestly reflect on the ongoing genocide in Gaza; to try to think through the conditions of possibility of a violence which seems to defy comprehension.
And we engage in this with Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt and René Schérer as our guides.
U.S. auto worker Sean Crawford (right, in hat) thanked Mexican auto worker Israel Cervantes (left) for his solidarity when they met in 2023. Cervantes and other Mexican General Motors workers had refused overtime when GM workers in the U.S. were on strike in 2019.
During the 2019 General Motors strike, while my fellow workers and I were pounding the pavement, something inspirational was happening south of the border: Mexican auto worker Israel Cervantes, along with many others at a GM plant in Silao, Guanajuato, refused overtime in solidarity with us.
Their practical action was particularly helpful to our cause because they built large trucks, which are the main source of revenue for our common employer. Israel was fired soon afterward, and he went on to help build the National Independent Union for Workers in the Automotive Industry (SINTTIA), ousting an employer-friendly union in Silao. SINTTIA has just won 10 percent raises for Mexican GM workers.
As talk of tariffs grows to a fever pitch, we should all take a page from Israel’s book if we want to build a more powerful, connected, and assertive labor movement. Time and time again, he has acted in solidarity with his fellow workers, regardless of which side of a border they live on.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi: The Question
From ctxt: Contexto y acción (28/03/2025) and Lobo suelto (28/03/2025)
A few days ago I received an invitation from an American association to participate in a conference to be held in Chicago on 5, 6 and 7 April. The theme of the convention is, “Is there a left in the 21st century?” I quickly replied:
“Unfortunately, my health is so precarious that I cannot make the trip to Chicago. So I will not be able to be with you in person. However, I will write a text and publish it before April so that you can read my reflections if you are interested in my views. Thank you for the invitation.”
Frankly (beyond my physical frailty), I have no desire to go to the United States, to that terrifying country where a mafia of aggressive racists rules over a population of unhappy individuals living in a frenzied competition for survival.
However, the question to be discussed at the convention is a good starting point for a much-needed reflection on the future (or non-future) of social subjectivity in this century. Here is my response.
Continue reading →