The rise of the myth of the future is rooted in modern capitalism, in the experience of expansion of the economy and knowledge. The idea that the future will be better than the present is not a natural idea, but the imaginary effect of the peculiarity of the bourgeois production model. Since its beginning, since the discovery of the new continent and the rewriting of the maps of the world, modernity has been defined by an amplification of the very limits of the world, and the peculiarity of capitalist economy resides exactly in the accumulation of the surplus value that results in the constant enhancement of the spheres of material goods and knowledge.
In the second part of the nineteenth century, and in the first part of the twentieth, the myth of the future reached its peak, becoming something more than an implicit belief: it was a true faith, based on the concept of “progress,” the ideological translation of the reality of economic growth. Political action was reframed in the light of this faith in a progressive future. Liberalism and social democracy, nationalism and communism, and anarchism itself, all the different families of modern political theory share a common certainty: notwithstanding the darkness of the present, the future will be bright.
In this book I will try to develop the idea that the future is over. As you know, this isn’t a new idea. Born with punk, the slow cancellation of the future got underway in the 1970s and 1980s. Now those bizarre predictions have become true. The idea that the future has disappeared is, of course, rather whimsical—since, as I write these lines, the future hasn’t stopped unfolding.
But when I say “future,” I am not referring to the direction of time. I am thinking, rather, of the psychological perception, which emerged in the cultural situation of progressive modernity, the cultural expectations that were fabricated during the long period of modern civilization, reaching a peak in the years after the Second World War. Those expectations were shaped in the conceptual frameworks of an ever progressing development, albeit through different methodologies: the Hegelo-Marxist mythology of Aufhebung and founding of the new totality of Communism; the bourgeois mythology of a linear development of welfare and democracy; the technocratic mythology of the all-encompassing power of scientific knowledge; and so on.
My generation grew up at the peak of this mythological temporalization, and it is very difficult, maybe impossible, to get rid of it, and look at reality without this kind of cultural lens. I’ll never be able to live in accordance with the new reality, no matter how evident, unmistakable, or even dazzling its social planetary trends. These trends seem to be pointing toward the dissipation of the legacy of civilization, based on the philosophy of universal rights.
The right to life, to equal opportunities for all human beings, is daily denied and trampled on in the global landscape, and Europe is no exception. The first decade of the new century has marked the obliteration of the right to life for a growing number of people, even though economic growth has enhanced the amount of available wealth and widened the consumption of goods. A growing number of people are forced to leave their villages and towns because of war, environmental waste, and famine. They are rejected, marginalized, and simultaneously subjected to a new form of slave exploitation. The massive internment of migrant workers in detention centers disseminated all over the European territory dispels the illusion that the “camp” has been wiped out from the world. Authoritarian racism is everywhere, in the security laws passed by European parliaments, in the aggressiveness of the European white majority, but also in the ethnicization of social conflicts and in Islamist fundamentalism.
The future that my generation was expecting was based on the unspoken confidence that human beings will never again be treated as Jews were treated during their German nightmare. This assumption is proving to be misleading.
I want to rewind the past evolution of the future in order to understand when and why it was trampled and drowned.
FUTURISM AND THE REVERSAL OF THE FUTURE
On Feb 20, 1909 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the first Futurist Manifesto, the same year that Henry Ford launched the first assembly line in his automobile factory in Detroit. Both events inaugurated the century that trusted in the future. The assembly line is the technological system that best defines the age of industrial massification. Thanks to it, the mass production of the automobile became possible and the mobilization of social energies was submitted to the goal of the acceleration of labor’s productivity.
MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.
3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.
4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath … a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
5. We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.
6. The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
7. Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.
8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.
9. We want to glorify war—the only cure for the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.
10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.
11. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.
Acceleration, speed, the cult of the machine—these are the values emphasized by the Futurist Manifesto. Marinetti’s text is a hymn to the disrupting modernity that in those decades was changing the face of the world, especially in the industrialized countries. Italy was not one of them: having only recently achieved national unification, its economy was based on agriculture, and the Italian style of life and consumption was traditional and backward. It wasn’t by chance that the Futurist movement surfaced in Italy—and in Russia. These two countries shared a common social situation: scant development of industrial production, the marginality of the bourgeois class, a reliance on cultural and religious models of the past, the allure of foreign culture (especially French) for urban intellectuals. This is the background of the Futurist explosion, both in Italy and in Russia, but we should not only see this movement as a reaction against national backwardness. On the contrary, it activated an aesthetic energy that spread all over Europe during the following decades; it was the artistic core of the enthusiastic belief that the future would fulfil great expectations in the fields of politics, science, technology, and new styles of life.
We declare that the splendor