Franco “Bifo” Berardi is one of the rare intellectuals who now refuses to speak from within the tradition of political thought. He was at the forefront of the Autonomist Movement in Italy in the 1970s and became one of the symbolic figures of the Bologna 1977 riots and the pirate radio station Radio Alice. Through his writings on media, labor, technology, and mental life, he established a line of thought that questions not only the economic but also the psychological and neurological dimensions of capitalism.
Berardi, now 76, began this interview by saying, “First, I must make a confession,” and continued: “Over the past year, I have decided that I no longer see myself as a political thinker. Political thinkers must be taken seriously; I, however, do not deserve that.”
According to Bifo, who argues that political thought presupposes a consistent horizon of possibilities for the future, this horizon has now closed. Bifo interprets the defeat of the left, the labor movement, and the revolutionary imagination of the 20th century not only as a political failure but also as the collapse of collective imagination.
Still, this does not mean he has given up on action; Berardi continues to position himself within the struggle against genocide, fascism, war, and exploitation.
The thinker who expressed the prediction that this century cannot be overcome has been criticized by some circles for encouraging hopeless inaction, but in this interview, he proposes an action that leans on pessimism. Bifo describes this action, formulated as “thinking with two minds,” as preparation for both extinction and “the sudden and unpredictable reversal of the horizon.”
The Rojava experience of the Kurdish Freedom Movement, according to the Italian thinker, is precisely such a practice: In this historical interval, witnessing the sharpest encounter between life and death, “a way to live…” We leave the word to Bifo…
At a time when massacres, destruction, repression, and exploitation are unfolding across large parts of the world, why have the left, socialists, and anti-war movements retreated? Is there still a meaningful left today? If so, what should it be doing? And if not, what kind of new movement — or new paradigm — do we need?
I think that we are suffering from cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance is when the categories that we use to interpret the present world have been formed in the past and applied to an old configuration of events that is no longer in our experience.
At that point, what’s happening around looks crazy, like an incomprehensible nightmare.
Real events are undecipherable for us, because the horizon of interpretation that we have in our minds is no longer there.
The horizon of our time, the horizon of the third decade of Century Twenty-One, is no longer the horizon that we have internalized in the Twenty Century, in which we could expect the final crisis of capitalism and the emergence of a socialist perspective.
You and I were formed inside the mental environment of the worker’s movement of the twentieth century, but the workers’ movement has been defeated, and that horizon has vanished: the subjective conditions for socialist transformation have dissolved, and capitalism has overcome its crisis by incorporating its model into technological form.
The movements of the new century—the social forums against capitalist globalism, the Arab democratic revolutions, the Occupy movement, the peace movement—have mobilized large masses of people, but they have always been defeated, because they lacked the material power that the workers’ movement had in the twentieth century.
The socialist hope was realistic when empathy and solidarity belonged to the sphere of possibility of social subjectivity, when workers had the strength to block the process of capitalist valorization.
This strength no longer exists because labor has been made precarious, and because the great migration has introduced elements of division into the field of labor, making nationalism to prevail over internationalism.
Therefore, I think that our century is no longer defined by the opposition between Right and Left, between capitalist hegemony and workers’ hegemony. This Century is defined by the opposition between life and death.
And death is prevailing.
Death is already prevailing. Climate change, worldwide genocide, arms race, Artificial Intelligence and natural dementia; these are trends that humankind seems to be unable to counteract.
In my dystopian imagination, humans will no longer exist at the end of the 21st century, they will be replaced by automatons: this process of replacement is already underway.
Obviously, I don’t pretend to be taken seriously when I write these lines. I prefer to be read as you read Philip Dick, William Gibson and Liu Cixin, science fiction imaginators whose visions and prophecies were the symptom of schizophrenic paranoia.
Frequently schizophrenic paranoia turns out to be the best way to feel (to smell, to intuit) the future.
Historically, the left has often defined itself through anti-imperialism. Years ago, Negri argued that the real task of the left was to organize against the capital itself. Do you agree? Is anti-imperialist discourse problematic today because it can obscure a critique of capital? Is a genuinely anti-capitalist internationalism still possible?
Anti-capitalist internationalism would be the only possibility of rescuing humankind on the brink of the final collapse. But I don’t see the conditions for a revival of anti-capitalist internationalism. Negri is totally out of the picture. He did not understand the real nature of hyper-colonial capitalism of the new Century.
In his most celebrated book, Empire, he seems to be dazzled by the fake lights of the Clintonian decade, and by the fake promises of the Internet. He speaks of the Empire as if it were that of Augustus, an era of peace and prosperity. Nothing of what Negri predicts in Empire is true today. Today’s emperor is not Augustus: the Emperor of our time is double-headed, and he resembles Caligula-Trump and Nero-Putin.
How do you see fascism and fascist tendencies evolving today? What changes do you observe in its social base and even in its mobilizing force? What common threads do you see between authoritarian regimes in countries like Turkey, Hungary, or Iran and figures or movements such as Trump, Meloni, or the AfD? Twentieth-century fascism was the euphoric manifestation of a young civilization, a young population, an expanding capitalism, a conquering colonialism. Twenty-first-century fascism is the contrary: it is the cure for the depression of a declining civilization, of an aging population. In our century, capitalism cannot expand without provoking environmental catastrophes, and the white race is no more euphorically futuristic, but it is frightened by the invasion of migrants. Racism is based upon senescent fear more than upon juvenile energy. It is as cruel and demented as old people can be. I don’t mean that the voters of the right-wing parties are only old people. I know well that many young people vote for Javier Milei, Donald Trump and Giorgia Meloni. But their mind is senescent, they are psychologically exhausted, depressed and alone. The only cure for their depression is aggressiveness, cruelty, war. Turkey and Iran are different from Western countries in many respects, but from the point of view of psychological exhaustion and juvenile depression, the difference is small, or nonexistent, because the global network has homogenized the social unconscious of the last generation, of the generation whose mind has been formatted by connective technology.
What is the most frightening development of our present moment?
The most frightening phenomenon is the ongoing process of deactivation of the critical mind.
According to the Oxford dictionary, “brain-rot” is the most used word of 2024. The generation of humans who learned more words from a machine than from the voice of a human being is half-conscious of the process of decay of the brain. But they can do nothing to counter this process.
So, what is the effect of the rotting of the human brain?
Climate change, nuclear war, racist aggression are frightening, of course. But these external degradations of the environment might be put under control, and regulated, and eventually resolved – if the human brain was sane.
But it is not. Subjected to the accelerating pace of neuro-stimuli, the human brain is less and less able to distinguish between reality and hallucination, less and less able to distinguish between friends and foes, and less and less able to live in peace with itself.
This is why we are doomed, this is why humankind will not survive this century.
Military conscription is becoming mandatory again in parts of Europe, and societies are being conditioned for war readiness. Are new wars on the horizon? What kind of war might we be facing?
In the European theater, war is the most likely prospect for the coming years.
The Ukrainian war has essentially been an American war against the European Union, and particularly against Germany, against the economic-energetic ties between Germany and Russia.
Europe has been drawn into the Ukrainian war by the Biden administration.
The US has forced Ukraine into war, has provoked Russia up to the point of persuading Putin to start the aggression against Ukraine. At that point, the US has changed president, and the new President is a fascist and a close ally of Russian fascism.
Therefore, the United States, after drawing Ukraine and Europe into war, has abandoned Ukraine and Europe.
Now the European economy is in deep shit, and the only way to recover is to invest in the military.
I don’t know if military investment will allow the economy to improve. What is certain is that Europe is preparing for war because it prophetizes that Russia will attack. But this is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
A particularly insane aspect of this militaristic trend in the EU is that, while governments prepare for war against Russia, people are increasingly voting for the pro-Putin right.
In Italy, Hungary, Slovakia and Czechia, the governments are more or less pro-Putin.
According to polls also in France, Germany, Great Britain and Spain, if there were elections, the pro-Putin right would win.
The European Union is the last bastion of liberal democracy against the oligarchic-plutocratic regime – two different forms of late-capitalism in the hyper-colonialist phase. However, liberal democracy is on the defensive, while plutocratic oligarchy is advancing and occupying new territories.
The Trump-Putinist oligarch-plutocratic regime is apparently winning the game. This does not mean that we are going towards a stable form of worldwide plutocratic-oligarchic dictatorship, and the game will be over. I think that the likely outcome will be the final disintegration of the game itself.
Disintegration is the main trend of the world order.
I would say that we are living in the order of disintegration.
In 2025, Abdullah Öcalan called on the PKK to lay down its arms and dissolve itself, stating that armed struggle has fulfilled its historical mission. How do you interpret this break with the tradition of revolutionary violence?
I have great respect for the leader of the PKK, and I cannot dare to interpret the motivations of Abdullah Öcalan.
I think that what he proposes is deeply motivated and true. I think that Öcalan has understood that the prospect of the twentieth-century communism had faded.
On the other hand, communism was the only way to avoid the final collapse of human civilization; it was the only way to avoid the extinction of the human race.
That means that the chance of survival of the human race is behind us.
In this case, in the case of the impossibility to redress the future, what can be done?
The only thing we can do is to desert the future, to renounce the future itself.
Can the Rojava experience — with its communes, people’s assemblies, autonomy, and democratic confederalism — offer a new source of hope? In what ways does Rojava differ from traditional nation-state-centered socialism?
What Öcalan defines democratic confederalism is the only possibility to imagine a humanistic and egalitarian way of life in the future, even if the common future will be short.
We must imagine the possibility of a good life even if the process of self-termination of humankind unfolds.
My persuasion is that human civilization will not survive the converging trends of climate, of war and of psychotic aggressiveness (plus the demographic trend of falling birthrate).
However, we must find a way of living in the interval between the present and the final termination: the Rojava methodology is a way to live in the interval.
Furthermore, we must remember that the inevitable often does not happen because the unpredictable prevails. Like the EZLN, Rojava is a way to get prepared in the unpredictable case that socialism comes back in the history of the world.
We must be prepared for extinction, but we must also be prepared for the sudden unpredictable reversal of the horizon. I call this double attitude: thinking with two brains.
In his 2025 messages, Abdullah Öcalan criticizes Marxism by saying that history cannot be reduced to class struggle alone. He emphasizes the ecological crisis, the liberation of colonized life, and the unfinished project of women’s liberation, while foregrounding a non-state, autonomous model of social construction. This critique seems to extend a tradition ranging from Althusser’s notion of the relative autonomy of the superstructure to feminist and ecological Marxism. In the 21st century, is class reductionism still adequate? How can we build organic connections between struggles — feminist, ecological, anti-colonial — without confining them to rigid identity categories?
We still need Marx if we want to understand the social and economic preconditions of the current situation, but we don’t need to comply with Marxist orthodoxy when it comes to the post-Marxist trends of human self-destruction. Marxism has not predicted the climate collapse, mass psychosis, and the demographic downturn. These trends did not belong to the Modern horizon of Marx.
Class reductionism has never been adequate: the composition of labor has always been stratified, internally differentiated.
Today, the internal segmentation of the working class makes a process of recomposition of subjectivity impossible. This is the effect of the neoliberal counter-revolution: it has introduced competition between workers, it has broken the unity of workers, introducing precariousness, and counterposing local workers and migrant workers.
So, nowadays, we can have intersectional forms of subjectivity, but we fail to create the conditions for the hegemony of the working class.
How closely does Öcalan’s proposal of bottom-up confederal organization, instead of a party-state model, align with your own post-socialist horizon?
I have never believed in the possibility of changing the nature of the State: the State is a reductionist machine that cannot comply with the processes of liberation. I have never been a Leninist, and this was the main difference between me and Toni Negri.
I understand that the experience of Rojava (together with the experience of the EZLN in Chiapas) are attempts to overcome the dissolution of internationalism, attempts to create spaces of permanent autonomy, islands of solidarity in the ocean of contemporary aggressiveness and self-destructiveness.
As I have said before, I don’t think that humankind will survive the present Century, but as long as we survive, we have to imagine forms of permanent autonomy. Secondarily, we must create life forms that can spread, in the unlikely event that humanity survives the century of hyper-colonialist suicidal dementia.
In your book Breathing, you propose chaos and poetry as forms of resistance to the speed of capitalism. In the face of today’s wars and the climate crisis, is a poetic form of solidarity still possible?
I would not say that chaos is a form of resistance. I would rather say that chaos is the acceleration of rhythm in which resistance becomes impossible, so that the only thing we can do is to find a way to disentangle from chaos, and simultaneously a rhythm (a poetical rhythm) that harmonizes with chaos.
It is important to understand that those who wage war against chaos will lose, because chaos feeds upon war. So, we must become friends with chaos. Poetry is the key for finding harmony with the chaotic rhythm.
What is freedom? How do you define freedom?
Two centuries ago, the British writer Samuel Johnson wrote: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”
The concept of freedom is the most astute conceptual trap of the Modern bourgeois culture.
Freedom means nothing if we don’t have the potency (social potency) to attain our goals, to fulfill our desires, to implement our projects. Without autonomy and without potency, freedom means nothing.
I prefer to speak of autonomy, which means the concrete possibility of doing what we need to do, of living the experience that we want to live.
Source: Yeni Özgür Politika