Populisms
Proliferating discussion of populism—in both right and left variants—often relates its rise to digital networks and platforms. We think this connection holds, but in manifold ways. The digitization of capital’s circulatory paths has played an important role in the deindustrialization, financialization, and changes in class composition underlying the explosion of populisms. Social media and mobile networks have then famously given populisms a voice, largely outside of the circuits of legacy media, as “digital parties” (Gerbuado 2016). And populist parties in sight of power then propose policy changes to the governance of digital capitalism, be it in in the direction of regulation or deregulation. Paradoxically, populist parties adept in the use of social media also often ride diverse and contradictory waves of “techlash” voicing suspicions of Big Tech. In all these respects, the combination of platforms and populisms is integral to a “crisis of hegemony” (Fraser 2017) destabilizing the political landscape of twenty-first century capitalism.
Degrowth Communism: Part III
Nick Dyer-Witheford, Bue Rübner Hansen, and Emanuele Leonardi discuss the topic of degrowth communism. Part three of a three-part series.
Degrowth Communism: Part II
Nick Dyer-Witheford, Bue Rübner Hansen, and Emanuele Leonardi discuss the topic of degrowth communism. Part two of a three-part series.
Degrowth Communism: Part I
Nick Dyer-Witheford, Bue Rübner Hansen, and Emanuele Leonardi discuss the topic of degrowth communism. Part one of a three-part series.
Working-class environmentalism and climate justice: The challenge of convergence today
On 9 July 2021, Melrose Industries announced the closure of its GKN Driveline (ex-FIAT) factory of car axles in Campi di Bisenzio, Florence, and the layoff of its workers (more than 400). While in many such cases the workers and unions settle for negotiating enhanced redundancy benefits, the GKN Factory Collective occupied the plants and kickstarted a long struggle against decommissioning. However, what makes the GKN Florence dispute really unique is the strategy adopted by the workers, who sealed an alliance with the climate justice movement by drafting a conversion plan for sustainable, public transport and demanding its adoption. Such strategy engendered a cycle of broad mobilisations – repeatedly bringing tens of thousands to the streets – so that the dispute is still open, and the factory remains under occupation as of today. In December 2022, Milan’s Feltrinelli Foundation released a special issue of its Quaderni, publishing the Plan for a Public Hub for Sustainable Mobility drafted by the GKN Factory Collective and their solidarity research group. This article – on the failure of the ecological transition ‘from above’ and the need for a convergence between workplace and community struggles to move towards a transition ‘from below’ – was originally published in Italian as a postface to the Plan.
Emanuele Leonardi & Mimmo Perrotta interview Dario Salvetti
PPPR publishes this interview to continue the line of discussion begun with Emanuele Leonardi’s essay on World Ecology and Autonomist Marxism, and Nick Dyer-Witheford’s piece on Biocommunism. In this interview – conducted on Dec. 21, 2021 – Emanuele Leonardi and Mimmo Perrotta interview Dario Salvetti, seeking to better understand the relationship between labor mobilizations (especially the occupation by workers at the GKN auto-parts plant in Italy) and climate justice. During months of intense mobilization, the workers' collective, with the support of solidarity engineers and economists, has developed – and continues to develop – proposals for a new re-industrialization plan, as part of a Public Sustainable Mobility Hub. The details of the PSMH are not yet fully known. Its political significance, however, is very clear: it is about thinking the necessary environmental planning with the workers' heads, not over them. And it is worth noting that such thinking is based on a constitutive relationship between workers' knowledge and political ecology.
Biocommie: Power and Catastrophe
This essay is a prospectus for biocommunism, a communism emerging from the catastrophes capital now inflicts throughout the bios, the realm of life itself. After a brief account of the theory behind its terminology, it sets out six elements of biocommunism: new disaster relief systems; opening borders to migrants fleeing calamity; expropriation of capital from crisis-critical industries; rationing of consumption; mobilization of emergency labour; and ecological and economic planning. It concludes with a short reconceptualization of the relation of socialism to communism in the light of species-extinction dangers.
Neopopulism as Geopolitics: Nick Dyer-Witheford interviews Raffaele Sciortino
Nick Dyer-Witheford interviews Raffaele Sciortino
Neopopulism as a Problem: Between Geopolitics and Class Struggle*
Tackling the theme of neopopulism - a term that will be justified in the exposition - means to face off against a series of obstacles, that make very difficult a debate that can assume it as a theoretical-critical object. This is not only about the media and academic mainstream which - apart from some timid cues from political sociology - is and remains incised in the liberal discourse, the more empty the more pervasive it is in public space. Nor just about the impossibility/incapacity of the left, be it liberal or radical, to reflect on the conditions of its own sunset. It is that any analysis of the phenomenon in a critical perspective does not have in front of it, and presumably will not have for a long time, a potentially political collective subject to leverage on, in order to make the analysis politically "expendable".