The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance

by Franco "Bifo" Berardi

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I don't have a book titled 'F***ing Up Our Country' to follow NFPL's election day special, but The Uprising, lent by @kiiirstenschmiiid , will do. Berardi pins the destructive Neoliberalist project all on Nixon, which is probably a good insight, freeing the dollar from the gold standard in 1972, and untying U.S. currency from material reality, and from empathy. He goes on to identify 1977 as the year everything changed, dubbing Charlie Chaplin as the last modernist, ending an era of belief in the future. That same year, as Berardi notes, Steve Jobs ushered in Apple's terrifyingly controlling ethic of planned technological obsolescence, while the Sex Pistols declared "No future for you!" (Movie geeks will note that was the same year Star Wars came out, which basically posits the ancient past as a future.) Seriously, though, this typically Semiotext(e)ian tome does offer an important viewpoint on the fundamental tendency of capitalism to create violence and injustice—and, most importantly, offers a solution: creating new, more just worlds through language.’

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-Nicholas Frank

 

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