Futurability: Franco “Bifo” Berardi on the Verso Podcast

Franco “Bifo” Berardi discusses his new book, Futurability, with editor Federico Campagna.

Renowned Italian Marxist theorist and activist “Bifo” Berardi talks about political impotence, the tool of humiliation and the victory of Donald Trump, his experience coming of age in '68, and why we are drawn to the concept of populism in the current political moment.

Stuck between global war and global finance, between identity and capital, we seem incapable of producing the radical change that is so desperately needed. Meanwhile the struggle for dominance over the world is a battlefield with only two protagonists: the forces of neoliberalism on one side, and the new order led by the likes of Trump and Putin on the other.

How can we imagine a new emancipatory vision, capable of challenging the deadlock of the present? Is there still a way to disentangle ourselves from a global order that shapes our politics as well as our imagination?

Overcoming the temptation to give in to despair or nostalgia, Berardi proposes the notion of ‘futurability’ as a way to remind us that even within the darkness of our current crisis a better world lies dormant.