The Second Coming

We have entered the gates to the apocalypse. This theological concept is the best metaphor to describe the world in which we are already living in. Chaos is all around us: political folly, economical delirium, ecological catastrophe, intellectual cynicism, technological simulation of life. This is what Franco Berardi suggests in this wry, dark, disconcerting but also brilliant and invigorating journey through the main events that we have witnessed in recent years. One century after the Communist revolution, the very idea that the world could be changed for the better seems dead once and for all. Every time that a new change occurs nowadays, it seems to be a change for the worse. But the fact that nothing can save us anymore shouldn’t be seen as a form of surrender or fatality. On the contrary, if our world is dead, then the space is open for another to appear – a world where apocalypse can shake us out of our contemporary zombie-like existence. The second coming of communism will have nothing to do with 1917. Apocalypse has to be conceived of as a metaphor, and communism is a metaphor too: the metaphor of the possible deployment of the possibilities of the mind.