LITMIR.BIZ

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we have been left only catastrophes to occupy.

      Today if you go to Zuccotti Park, beware of police: gatherings of more than three people are forbidden.

      Everywhere social life is pillaged by those who hold the financial levers, wherever society is unable to defend itself against those who would pillage.

      And identitarian aggression is spreading everywhere. White racism is clearly resurfacing in the US, where KKK-like aggressions against black people have become a daily litany.

      I had trusted Obama, but now, as his second term expires, I’m sad to say that his performance has persuaded me that political hope is over. At a certain point, Obama changed his philosophy from the hopeful ‘Yes We Can’ of 2008 to a cynical ‘Don’t Do Anything Stupid’.

      Okay, I told myself, ‘Don’t Do Anything Stupid’ is a pragmatic compromise considering the complexity of the contemporary world. Then, I witnessed the final sinking of his presidency when the Supreme Court rejected a plan to shield millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation and give them the right to work legally in the United States. And then, his administration’s unconscionable cooperation with the president of Mexico in the act of deporting Central American refugees.

      Obama and Peña Nieto have cooperated for two years to intercept desperate Central American refugees in southern Mexico, long before they can reach the U.S. border. These refugees are then typically deported to their home countries – which can be a death sentence.

      The American–Mexican collusion began in 2014 after a surge of Central Americans crossed into the U.S., including 50,000 unaccompanied children. Obama spoke with Peña Nieto ‘to develop concrete proposals’ to address the flow. This turned out to be a plan to intercept Central Americans near Mexico’s southern border and send them home. Washington committed $86 million to support the program. Although Obama portrayed his action as an effort to address a humanitarian crisis, he made the crisis worse. The old routes minors took across Mexico were perilous, but the new ones adopted to avoid checkpoints are even more dangerous.

      The victims of this policy, deported in some cases to their deaths, are refugees like Carlos, a 13-year-old with a scar on his forehead from the time a gang member threw him to the ground in the course of executing his uncle.

      In the last five years, Mexico and the U.S. have deported 800,000 people to Central America, including 40,000 children, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Last year, Mexico deported more than five times as many unaccompanied children as it had five years earlier, and the Obama administration heralds this as a success.³

      Is my hero a coward? Is Obama a cynical and cruel careerist who gave away his principles and his moral values in exchange for his position? I don’t think so. Fundamentally, I think humiliation has made him desperate.

      Fundamentally, I think that we have to meditate on his experience and acknowledge that democracy is over, that political hope is dead. Forever.

      Writing and Surfing

      I should not write as if I was surfing the wave of this age: it is too dangerous, and I know it. Nevertheless, I cannot renounce the pleasure (the ambiguous and self-defeating pleasure) of interpreting signs that are not yet detectable, and processes that are still deploying.

      So, this book is an attempt to map the currents of tidal change.

      We are shifting from the Age of Thatcher to the Age of Trump – this is my general interpretation of the present becoming of the world. An anti-global front of so-called populist regimes is taking shape in the Western world, in the space of the demographical and economic decline of the white race (when I employ this word, I know that it has no scientific foundation but I also know that it can act as a powerful political mythology). The election of Trump to the presidency of the United States is the point of no return in the worldwide conflict between capitalist globalism and reactionary anti-globalism.

      After the Treaty of Versailles, German society was suddenly impoverished and subjected to a long-lasting humiliation. In that situation, Hitler found his opportunity and his winning move consisted in urging Germans to identify as a superior race, not a humiliated class of exploited workers. This claim worked then and is working again now on a much larger scale: Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, Jarosław Kaczyński and Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen and Boris Johnson, and many more small politicians of mediocre culture who smell the opportunity to win power by embodying the white race’s will to potency in the wake of its decline.

      The racial call is getting stronger, so much so that Boris Johnson calls Obama ‘part-Kenyan’, and racial fear motivates the anti-migrant policy of the European Union. The emergent racism is a legacy of colonialism combined with the social defeat of the working class in the Western world.

      Frightening as it may be, the trend that I detect in the present becoming of the world is the unification of a heterogeneous front of anti-global forces, the resurgence of national-socialism and a widespread reaction against the decline of the white race perceived as the effect of globalization. As the social reference of the reactionary fronts that are winning all over the world is the defeated white working class, I would rather speak of national-workerism.

      Mario Tronti has labelled industrial workers a ‘rude pagan class’ that fights for material interests and not for rhetorical ideals. It is for the sake of material interests the rude class of industrial workers is now turning nationalist and racist, as it did in 1933. Trump has won because he represents a weapon in the hands of impoverished workers, and because the left has delivered them into the hands of financial capital otherwise weaponless. Unfortunately, this weapon will soon be turned against the workers themselves, and lead them towards racial warfare.

      This Euro-American anti-global racist front is certainly the fruit of thirty years of neoliberal governance. But until yesterday, in Europe as in the United States the conservatives were globalist and neoliberal. No more.

      The looming war is already being defined as fighting along three different fronts. The first front is the neoliberal power that is tightening its grip on governance, pursuing the agenda of austerity and privatization. The second front is the anti-global Trumpism based on white resentment and working-class despair. The third front, taking place largely backstage, is the growing necro-empire of terrorism, in all its different shapes of religious bigotry, national rage and economic strategy, that I identify as necro-capital.

      I think that the War on Terror, whose main target is the global jihad, will sooner or later give way to the war between capitalist globalism and worldwide anti-global national-socialism (that may be named ‘Putin-Trumpism’).

      Democracy Will Not Come Back

      I do not identify impotence as powerlessness. Often when lacking power, people have been able to act autonomously, to create forms of self-organization and to subvert the established power. In this age of precariousness, powerless people have been unable to create effective forms of social autonomy, unable to implement voluntary change, unable to pursue change in a democratic way, because democracy is over.

      One of the final nails in the coffin of democracy came in the summer of 2015, when the democratically elected, anti-austerity government of Greece was obliged to bend to financial blackmail. In the very place where democracy had been invented twenty-five centuries ago, democracy was suspended. Rather, what we in the European Union are facing is not merely provisional suspension of democracy, but the final replacement of politics with a system of techno-financial automatism.

      Expecting the revivification of democracy and fighting for such a goal would be futile because the very conditions for the effectiveness of political reason (and particularly of democratic politics) have since dissolved. I’m not talking here of a political or a military defeat, or a battle that was lost. Many times in the course of modern history the good guys have been defeated; they have resisted, have recovered and, in the end, have achieved what they needed by playing and winning the democratic game. But I think that this will not happen again.

      The systemic conditions for democracy have been cancelled by prevailing irreversible processes. Irreversible is the enslavement of immaterial labour because the global labour market requires boundless

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