Attention & Zones of Human Resistance: Interview with Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi @ Autonomedia March 30th, 2009 With Malav Kanuga, Stevphen Shukaitis, and Jim Fleming

You are suggesting that there is a reversal between the US and Europe. Bifo: Until six months ago, maybe three months ago, you could get the impression that Europe was where movements had a grasp on the institutional level and that the US was in very bad shape. Now all of a sudden it’s the exact opposite. I don’t know what is going to happen in the US but I feel that here – I mean I don’t know what is going to happen between in the relationship the state and US capitalism – but here I feel the ground is ready for a proliferation of social experiments, of cultural initiatives and so on. Europe, on the contrary seems to be eaten by a proliferation of fascist feelings. The economic crisis is probably worse here in the US than in Europe. But the difference is that in Europe we don’t have a federal budget. So what? So the different states are saying very bad things about protectionism but of course everybody is following a protectionist policy. You see Sarkozy against the Czechs, you see Angela Merkel in Germany saying we will not rescue the Lithuanian banks. You see Italy, Spain and Greece sinking more and more into a difficult situation and Germany and France pretending not to see. You see that everybody is going his own way. This could mean in the near future a real squandry of the European Union. The movements are charged with the political task of defending and protecting the cultural meaning of the Union. This could become interesting. The EU has been so far an economic alliance between banks. All of a sudden it could become the object of a social action. But at the same time the protectionists are producing very bad feelings in the population. Like fascism growing in Italy. The same can be said of Lithuania, Estonia, and the Baltic states. In France I have witnessed a very dangerous trend which is the militarization of the banlieues. Militarization in what sense? On one side police and on the other groups of young people using guns against the police. I mean the general trend of the EU landscape seems to be towards an aggressive and right wing radicalization. Of course things can change. But in general this is the trend.

Is there any sense that the G20 meeting in London this week is purely symbolic? Is there nothing they can accomplish? I don’t know what is going to happen in London. I don’t know what the movement is going to do. On Saturday in Rome there was a big demonstration against the London summit and this was important because Italian government has introduced the law that forbids any demonstration on Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday because it is disturbing the shopping and on Sunday because it disturbs the church. This demonstration was so large that police could do nothing. I don’t expect much from this London summit. Nobody expects very much. In the press everybody is saying that this is a starting moment – Obama is going there and is trying to say friendly things. There is no idea, there is no single unified idea about what to do about the crisis and also the relationship between the US and Europe is reversed. You find that the US is now trying to launch a difficult but possible start of redistribution of wealth. When I read the proposed budget of the administration I see that the trend is very shy and very slowly going towards more taxes for the wealthy and more money for the workers. Anyway it is a trend. In Europe, no way at all! Everybody, every government is speaking only of “the night has to pass” – wait a second and then business as usual, neoliberalism as usual, no change in view. So I don’t see the possibility .... we are not in the Seattle period. It is not the moment to launch a unified movement against the summit. It is much more the moment of creating local situations of autonomy, of territorial organization. We are not going to be able to fight a big fight. It’s a starting moment. It is a moment that is really the beginning of a new age of insurrection, self- organization, everything. The big fight will come maybe in three or four years. Now we have to create.

I agreed with what Hakim Bey said in his book Temporary Autonomous Zone, but now we have to create non-temporary autonomous zones. This is our task now. We are walking in this direction in Bologna for instance. We have launched and created a list for the local elections in June, we (www.bolognacittalibera.org ) proposed Valerio Monteventi for mayor of the city. He is a metal worker who is known all over Bologna as the political leader of the working class. We are pushing for his election. We have launched a program that is based on the abolition of cars, the complete change of the energy programs in the city, redistribution of wealth, and the creation of a fund for workers who lose their jobs. Let’s say: a radical program, a utopian program if you like, which is to act as the metaphor for what has to be done in the next few years. I have never engaged myself in a local election. But now I think it can be very useful. I guess we are going to have a good score in the election because people are listening to us. The feeling is that we are crazy but our craziness is something to do with the present situation so they are listening. For us to have a very good score, 6 or 7%, which should be much more than the Refoundizioista Comunista, we expect something like that. But the problem is not so much the election, the problem is to create a new kind of attention about the creation of zones of human resistance.

On the one hand your saying that its “beyond our knowledge” to get beyond this crisis, that this is in some sense the final form, because there is no way to get beyond that. But at the same time that seems to me to be the definitional stance of any crisis that threatens to become deeper and deeper. It imposes limits on the knowledge of how to continue and get beyond that. At the same time we have knowledge from our perspective on how to proliferate these non-temporary autonomous zones. I wonder if even though it seems like capitalists don’t have the knowledge of how to keep capitalism going that they’ll still take up the classic strategy of following the working classes self-activity in period of crisis, follow its autonomy, and then ensnare it at the moment it’s building power and exiting. I just wonder if this is really the end of capitalism.

I’m not an economist but I understand two or three things. When I don’t I call Christian Marazzi and he explains the rest. What I understand is this: their plan to resolve the crisis expands the debt. It is unavoidable. Rescue the banks, maybe also rescue some social situations – like Obama is trying to do with people who lose their houses and so on – but how can they do that? They have to renounce the debt and this means that next year, next ten years, next generation, will be paying for this debt more and more. The demand is going to decline in the future. I think this is crystal clear. I don’t see anyway out, I don’t see any growth coming back, the idea of recovery is just to laugh. It’s nonsense. So what has to be our action in this situation? I think we have to act on two different levels. Contradictory in a sense, but complementary too. One is a cultural revolution based on the idea that un-growth does not mean misery. And so the problem is to question the anthropological meaning of richness. Richness has been conceived as acquisitional during the 500 years of capitalist modernity, has been conceived as having much. Now, I am not an ascetic. Now we have to conceive of richness as enjoying time, enjoying the body, enjoying the social relationships and communal things. The idea that the physical things have to be private property is an old idea starting from the material stuff we discovered that property is an old idea. The good idea is sharing. Not only sharing ideas but also sharing physical things. Why to have a private car and not sharing a car for instance? This is the first problem of which I could call part of this more cultural revolution. This is not a spiritual revolution, it is very materialist, but cultural.

Second, there is another level, which is the relationship to salary. What we have discovered is not only a subprime housing and mortgage bubble, not only a financial bubble, but also a bubble of working. We have been working too much during the last 500 years. We have produced too many things! I know that there is another side to it. The old idea of basic income or citizenship revenue is absolutely up to date. This is the moment. Not only because there is a problem of redistribution of wealth, which is true, but mainly because the very meaning of what salary was during capitalism is over. You can no more find a relationship between time of work and salary. Here we find a deep source of the present crisis. This relationship is already destroyed by the immaterialization of labor. Creative and cognitive work is definitely unquantifiable, uncountable. It is immeasurable. When they say the “the wicked executives from AG [UBS AG] has taken 5 billion dollar bonus” this is a symptom of a complete craziness of the relationship between money, time and labor. I understand that crazy pig. He is a crazy pig, but it’s absolutely normal. He can say “yes, this is the value of my labor” and can you say “No it is not true because you are bankrupting everything”? That is not the problem. I want to say the same: “my work is worth 2 billion dollars.” I don’t want to say that the industrial Fordist worker can be properly evaluated because it is not true. But you can find a middle evaluation that is socially defined. And it worked, in limited sense. The relationship between time and revenue is an old idea. We need to find another idea. It is very simple: the right to life. Revenue is simply the right of a person of 80 years to have money in his pocket. Then the problem of employment is different problem. The complete separation of revenue and labor is an idea that we need to focus on. These are the two ideas that I see as a program for the next time: New idea of richness (a frugal richness) and a redistribution of wealth, or basic income.

The difficulty of putting a measure on cognitive and creative work is even if it is ultimately immeasurable what you are just measuring, measuring through imposition, is the class relation. So the measure used is a measure that can be contested. But the interesting thing about looking at cultural and creative workers, a lot of time they are so bought into the idea that this is my production. It’s so individuated that they actually buy into this notion because it creates their self-conception. What I wonder is as you develop a new conception of social wealth and time how do you break down those personal, libidinal investments in these perceptions individual production that cultural workers find themselves in? The notion of MY THING keeps them in a very atomized position.

It is like capitalism now is the ability of the economic network to capture the creative activity of the society. This means also that you cannot reduce the activity of individuals, of groups and so on to an objective norm of evaluation. This is at the same time an old situation that already existed in the times of Marx but it is new too. Marx already said that the idea of worth of labor value is a fake idea because labor is the source of value, so how can you evaluate the source of value? Marx was right of course but nevertheless the relationship between the industrial worker and the capitalist was reducible to a common class relationship of force. It was possible to assess an average socially necessary labor time, and through that value. Now the problem is that you cannot define the relationship between time and product. This is completely exploded. Certainly in the 30% of labor which is definable as immaterial labor. But also inside the industrial labor it is more and more difficult because of the effect of the new technologies and globalization. For instance I remember in the 1990’s, in the period of Seattle, that someone launched a war for a minimum global salary. And I remember someone saying that in a meeting in Bologna and people saying “you are crazy, it is too much, it is impossible.” And then ten years after, this idea is already there. The Chinese workers nowadays have not the same salary of a European or an American worker but they’re approaching it. In one or two years starting from the devaluation of the American dollar, it’s going to be completely realistic to have the homogenization of salary. Of course capitalism is going to look for new places where to exploit people. The process of equalization of salaries is already there. What has to be broken is the paranoiac relationship between the time of labor and the available money. This relationship is a culturally Protestant or puritan idea. The idea that you have to suffer to eat. Why? If it is socially un-useful, why should I suffer?

I am curious then on what scale these non-temporary autonomous zones are possible? It is easier to imagine these efforts on a local scale. But by what process do these NTAZ become increasingly contagious? How do we get from this household to this neighborhood to this city and then on the planetary scale? In my mind all the hierarchies that make this communism impossible have be dismantled. If we impose relative communisms within the hierarchy, I think this is part of the way capitalism recovers from this crisis, so it is not about relative communisms, but something entirely else. So I wonder if the scale question is the way to start thinking about it but for me that’s one way of thinking it through in relationship to everyday life.

I’ll answer that in a Guattarian way. Guattari says you don’t even have individuals. You have molecules and flows. So I am not an individual, I am the collection of different desires, needs, material chemical fluxes and so on. The problem of scale, I don’t want to avoid your question, which is politically very interesting, but I want to start from the molecular level. Molecular means that we have to produce some change at the level of the infra-individual. This mean that me as an individual I am not exactly sure I am going to do one thing or another. Some part of me wants to go this direction and something in my psychic composition is relaxing the acquisitional need, and so on, eating less, eating better, I don’t know exactly what, expecting different things. If you start from the molecular level you see that it is not so much a problem of scale but rather a problem of proliferation. Actually we are trying to create in Bologna, we want to win the election because if Valerio Monteventi is the mayor, we will change everything. Cars pushed to outside the city, in every school we will have two hours of yoga everyday in order to enter into healthier relationships... crazy things producing effects on the level which is not exactly the scale of the city but much more the level of new understandings, new desires, new possibilities. It is important that it has a viral effect, a contagion effect.

I’m asking because it is possible that there will be qualitative differences in the struggles to maintain those different autonomous zones. Each one has more or less a different relationship to the state in its attempt to restrict these activities. I think it is possible for Autonomedia to organize this household, which is very much about the therapy of communism. But I take your point and I very much agree that it is not a question of scale in terms of imposing these different types of limits, but at a certain point the struggle to maintain these forms does have to come across the state’s ability to annihilate these things. You are already planning at the level of Bologna in participating in a campaign like this and we will see what the state does to respond to this.

You say in a very political sense “what is going to happen” but its not... if I look back to the 70s when you talk about a free zone, or a red base in the Maoist sense, but it is not the same because there was a military idea of occupation of space and of militarily defending borders of the space. And then attacking, and extending. We’re not exactly going to create a fortress, we are much more launching viral messages. What is important in the future is for more and more people to start to think “why should I have a personal car and should rather than sharing the car with ten other people?” or “why should I need a job when I can make the eggplants and tomatoes in my terrace so I am not forced to go to work every day?” You cannot say there is the right order. You decide what you need – maybe you need much maybe you need less – I don’t need a car. I don’t have a permit. I live very well. If I can explain to another person, “you know I don’t have a car and I’m happy, so why do you spend so much money on your car and don’t take a taxi twice a week?” This is not exactly a red zone. This is much more the creation of many small flows of change in the relationship between the subject and the economy. How can the capitalist come to me and say “no you have to own your own car!” they cannot do that. It is not exactly in opposition between two fronts. It is much more the infiltration. This is exactly the moment. Ten years ago people did not want to listen. Now as they are forced to ungrowth, you can speak of a happy ungrowth. I read yesterday that there is a book called The Happy Ungrowth [La decrescita felice, www.decrescitafelice.it] by Maurizio Pallante. But, happy ungrowth, perhaps that does not sound so good in English. Do you have a better word for it?

There isn’t a better word that doesn’t sound negative. It’s like there is one point where Spinoza says there is no word for collective joy, there is also no word for positive ungrowth… perhaps substruction?

Yeah, but it does not directly relate to the economic thing which is the growth.

And growth has been the key word in the economy for the past 30 years.

Transcribed by Kelly Fritsch