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.
The wrong question
Will the left exist in the 21st century? My answer is: I do not find this question interesting. The very meaning of the word left has been lost because, with the exception perhaps of a few countries like Spain, most of those who have been part of centre-left governments in the last thirty years have completely betrayed the working class and society in general. Moreover, the world in which the word left meant something has disappeared.
In the US, in the UK and in most European countries, the left has been the spearhead of the neoliberal devastation of social life. The role of Blair, Schröder, Hollande and the other social democrats who governed in the 1990s and the first decade of the new century was to devastate the living conditions of society in favour of profit and competitiveness, to privatise public services and to favour the transfer of money from workers to the rich. The racist policy of rejection of immigrants has also been conceived and designed by politicians such as the Italian Marco Minniti (ex-communist, then interior minister in a centre-left government, architect of the policy of deportation of migrants that inspires Meloni and Trump).
In the US, the Clinton, Obama and Biden administrations have aligned themselves perfectly with the conservative policy of imperialist aggression. As a result, it can be said that throughout the West the centre-left has been responsible for the widespread disillusionment that led many voters to abandon the left and turn to the emerging national-liberalism that eventually culminated in the Trumpist fury.
The Nazi-libertarians are restoring a slave regime and pushing the West towards national aggression and war. But the reason for the rise of this ultra-reactionary wave lies in the treachery of the self-styled left. So why should I worry about the fate of a political class that, calling itself left-wing, has followed the same policies as the right?
The interesting question today is not: is there a left in our future? The interesting question is whether or not our social existence will find a way to escape from the ongoing aggression and the return of slavery, social terror, militarisation and war. Will social life find a way for social subjectivation? Will a movement (conscious, collective and in solidarity) emerge in the current context of competition, depression, panic and de-eroticisation of social life? This is the interesting question I am trying to answer.
Panic
A psychotic wave is sweeping Western society: the cause of mass panic psychosis is a kind of senile collapse of the Western mind.
What is panic? In the last chapter of What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari reflect on ageing and talk about senescence in terms of the relationship between order and chaos: “(…) A little order to protect us from chaos. Nothing is more distressing than a thought that escapes itself, than ideas that escape, that disappear as soon as they are formed, already eroded by oblivion or precipitated into others that we no longer master (…) infinite variabilities, whose appearance and disappearance coincide (…)”.
“Chaos” is defined here in terms of speed, the acceleration of the info-sphere as opposed to the slow rhythms of reason and the emotional mind. When things start flowing so fast that the human brain becomes unable to make sense of the information, due to the chaos, we enter the state of panic. Panic is the inability to make decisions because what is happening around us is too fast, too complex, and therefore undecidable.
Panic explains the current behaviour of the European Union that is inconsistent to the point of insanity. To please the American master (Biden), three years ago European leaders decided to push the Ukrainian people into war against Russia. They broke the economic link with Russia and went into warmongering mode, supporting and arming Ukrainian nationalism. It was a suicidal decision because Biden’s purpose was to break the economic relationship between Europe and Russia, and to defeat Germany. Germany has been defeated, Ukraine has been destroyed. Europe has been pushed to the edge of the abyss.
Then the American master (Trump) betrayed the Ukrainian cause and left the Europeans to their fate. Millions of people have left Ukraine; countless young men have died in the trenches of the Donbas. Ukrainians are defeated, impoverished and humiliated. Europeans are caught in a trap. After falling into a panic crisis, Macron, Starmer, Merz and Ursula von der Leyen decided to do something useless, dangerous, destructive and self-harming: a huge investment of money for the rearmament of the continent.
What to do in a panic situation? My suggestion is not to make decisions, not to focus on the torrent of information, but to take a deep breath and renounce action. European leaders, on the other hand, have decided to launch a massive plan for rearmament and military conversion of the automotive industry.
Will the Russians stand idly by while Europeans arm themselves to the teeth, or will Putin decide to attack Europe before it is ready for war?
The widespread Russophobia of European leaders risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. As Europeans rush to take up arms in fear of Russian aggression, I fear that the Russians will not sit back and lazily wait for Europeans to fully rearm.
Depression
According to psychiatrists, depression is the predominant pathology of the generation that learned more words from a machine than from its mother’s voice. Depression is unpleasant, it is painful; well, depression is depressive. So you would do almost anything to free yourself from its clutches. It turns out that aggressive mobilisation of mental energies can be a therapy for depression.
Hitler knew this. To depressed Germans, humiliated after World War I, he said: ‘Do not consider yourselves defeated workers, consider yourselves warriors. Do not consider yourselves humiliated. Consider yourselves humiliated’. He won the election, and the Germans dragged Europe into the nightmare of World War II.
Aggressive self-identification, nationalist mobilisation and patriotism act as an amphetamine therapy for the depressed mind. This therapy works for a while. Then it descends into abysmal tragedies. That is why the psychotic wave of the senescent western culture converges with the political decisions of an important part of the new generation.
As you can see, the interesting question is not whether the left will exist in the 21st century, but how to escape the reaction of the panic-depressive cycle that abruptly exploded in 2025.
Is it possible to initiate a process of conscious subjectivation and social autonomy?
Mass desertion
My old pacifist friends express their dismay that there is no political mobilisation against the rearmament of the European Union and no mass demonstrations against the increasing militarisation of the economy and public discourse.
I understand their dismay, but I know that since 15 February 2003, after the huge worldwide mobilisation against the Iraq war, the peace movement has dissolved. On that occasion, pacifism could not stop the war, and today it is hard to believe that demonstrations and protests are useful to stop the frenzy.
The madness of European warmongers is not rooted in political strategy, but in the mental collapse of Western culture, unable to cope with its own irreversible decline. And it is (obviously) rooted in the interests of the military industrial complex.
What we need is much more than demonstrations and protests. What social life needs is a way out of the militarisation of European society. What is needed is a massive wave of defections; desertion from war, but also desertion from the war economy and from nationalist obsession.
Obsession
The year 2025 marks a before and an after. In the last century, the framework of social subjectivation was the class struggle: internationalism and workers’ solidarity against exploitation.
This is no longer the case. The framework has changed because social consciousness has become hyper-fragmented, social time has become cellularised and semiocapital has transformed the production process into a recombination of living fractals. Solidarity has been erased from social life due to the precarisation of labour.
Precarity, isolation and loneliness have unleashed a wave of mental anguish and dysphoria. Social subjectivation has shifted from the realm of social conflict to that of psycho-biopolitics. At the global level, biological identification (racial, ethnic, national) has replaced social solidarity. Belonging has replaced conscience. Ferocity and the struggle for life have replaced conflict for the redistribution of social wealth. Consequently, survival and genocide are the cardinal points of the new biopolitical map.
Consciousness and psychosis
Consciousness (awareness of oneself and of the other) is criminalised: woke is the key word for this criminalisation. To be awake (conscious) means to be weak: the generation that some sociologists call the ‘snowflake generation’ (in Spain the term ‘crystal generation’ is more common) is so fragile because young people take responsibility for white colonisation and think of sexuality in terms of choice and not in terms of the natural supremacy of men.
If you want to be strong, forget about consciousness, rely on Trump and money. If you want to be strong, forget about thought and believe (in God, in the nation, in white supremacy, in the superior civilisation of the West).
In 1919, Sandor Ferenczy said that psychoanalysis was incapable of treating mass psychosis. So was politics. Everyone knows what happened in Europe after 1919. A century later, we are at the same point. Now a question arises: is Trump’s kingdom invincible? I don’t think so. I think the monsters are not going to triumph forever because all over the world they have set in motion a process of general disintegration: the disintegration of the state, the disintegration of social civilisation, the disintegration of the environment.
The Western order is crumbling and will crumble. The question we need to investigate is this: can a collective and supportive subjectivity emerge from the ruins of civilisation?
Disintegration
the geopolitical map, the social system, and the senile brain of the West, all are in a process of disintegration. The economic integration of the South (BRICS) is a danger to the senile Western world. The imminent crisis of the dollar as the centre of the global financial system and the demographic decline of the Northern Hemisphere have forced the United States to abandon the globalisation project that was the strategic axis of the last thirty years (the so-called Empire). Now they are betting everything on the alliance with Russia for white supremacy.
Trump-Putinism is the project of restoring white supremacy, dividing the world into zones of hyper-colonialist influence, the liquidation of liberal democracy, and the beginning of a process of extractive devastation of the planet’s resources.
Genocide, deportation and detention of the migrant population, mass slavery, definitive destruction of the environment: all this will occur under the Trump-Putin hegemony.
Will this project work? Will the predatory mafia control the chaotic flows of terror, suffering, and war implied by the ongoing disintegration?
Crumbling order, imminent collapse of the environment and the economy; trauma is the panorama of the century.
Trauma
In the dense web of obsession, it is possible to perceive the signs of an impending collapse, a trauma of the future. Trauma is often linked to a past experience of loss or violence. Now, for the first time, we are faced with a reverse trauma: the trauma of imminent and inevitable collapse that torments the minds and bodies of young people around the world.
The dysphoric generation, which has grown up in a state of physical isolation and emotional paralysis, is traumatized by the indescribable perception of an impending catastrophe. They know that the planet is increasingly incompatible with human life. They feel that adults have become powerless to prevent catastrophic climate change. They suffer from their condition of loneliness and are increasingly unable to manage their own sexual bodies. Eventually, they are overwhelmed by the intensification of info-neural stimulation.
The snowflake generation is traumatised by something that has not yet happened, but is perceived as imminent, and a process of subjectivation can only be based on this shared experience of future trauma. The outcome of everything has caused a trauma that is the starting point for the next process of subjectivation.
How can we build an active and conscious subject from trauma?
Is there any way to escape the spiral of suicidal dementia emanating from the senescence of the West?
This is the question that needs to be answered.
Contexto y acción (28/03/2025) and Lobo suelto (28/03/2025)
Länk: https://autonomies.org/2025/04/franco-bifo-berardi-the-question/
Feed