Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of My World
A people’s world history of resistance in recent centuries consists of a history of revolutionary left and reactionary liberal, of the progress of insurgency and the conservatism of counter-insurgency. But when one brackets their historical lens to the contemporary age – the age of actually-existing Big Brother in the so-called “West” ushered in by sci-fi surveillance technologies made non-fiction, the consolidation of media dissemination and algorithmic manipulation by the capitalist class with the de jure ruling class, and the crushing of the militant wing of the left’s foothold in mass politics – the story complicates. Indeed, as scholars like Domenico Losurdo and Gabriel Rockhill have called attention to in their contributions to left counter-history, many Western Marxists despairing at the triumph of capitalism in the imperial core have downplayed or even outright neglected the improbable triumphs of people’s movements from below in places like Cuba, China, Vietnam, Korea, and much of Eastern Europe. Remarkable resistances to imperialism continue to this day in Iran, the Sahel region, and much more, proving time and again in the evidence of victory that the greatest power of all does reside on the side of the governed. And, yet, the global ideological fracturing by regional discrepancies in culture, technology, and critical thought has resulted in a left that, worldwide, sees actually-existing anti-imperialism through completely differing lenses. For all of their moral impurities (and there are surely are many), the leading contemporary resistance movements to global capital are doing what feels decades too late for in the West – galvanizing the masses and winning on a systemic scale.
In this essay, I will examine the cultural scene of the contemporary popular left in the West, with one particular question front of mind: why does it feel as if the scope of the possible has narrowed to include only the end of the world? The goal is not to diminish all of the brilliant work and achievement of activists past and present, but instead to ask why it is only our antagonists who penetrate and permeate our realism. The short answer, for my money, begins with the idea that we humans are often bad statisticians and poor psychologists. Digital media provides instant access to society in the form of profitable digital content consisting of carefully curated performances capturing a reductive image of one’s character and personhood at a static moment in time – not necessarily conducive to inspiring hope for social movements for us unwitting logicians.
What follows is not a new political prescription for the age, nor even a diagnosis of the illness in need of a magic bullet; rather, it is more like a foray into the unthinkable – the possibility that the only hope left for the demos to win is to give up on winning – winning, that is, as we have come to understand it. It may feel ridiculous, but in accepting the unquestionable, I have ridiculed myself enough for this lifetime. The peculiar answers to a unique age will not be instantiated by those of ages past.
“Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle.”
Lenin, “L. N. Tolstoy and the Modern Labour Movement”
Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of My World
In February of 2022 – the early era of post-lockdown COVID-19 and a mere few days before Vladimir Putin’s mass invasion of Ukraine – Franco “Bifo” Berardi gathered friends, students, and activists to discuss a question he’d posed in anticipation of and preparation for our collective emergence from the fear and loneliness that shrouded the days of global lockdown. With dozens of friends and students overflowing the halls of the city center, the question, “How will we survive – conceded, and not given – that we will survive?” was discussed (Berardi Lecture 3). Hours of inspired imagining and pontificating over a future of war, climate collapse, and viruses ensued; and, yet, he could not provide an answer at day’s end.
Fast forward to today (July 2025 at the time of this writing) and Bifo, like most of us, is no further closer to an answer now than he was then. In his seminar this recent June for the Global Center of Advanced Studies titled “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World”, Bifo remarked that “We do not have a theoretical script for what we are witnessing, what we are living. Yes, someone may be a Marxist…But frankly, the blueprint is not so clear at this point…The point is that we are discovering a landscape that has not been imagined by theory, by sociology, by economics, by political theory…” (Berardi Lecture 3). There are still those leftists who still believe that history’s destiny is a telos of global communism, a la the young Marx of The Communist Manifesto, but for most of us yearning for collective liberation, be we scholars, activists, dilettantes, or regular folk – if there were any inevitability to history, it would seem more likely to be on the side of global subordination, global chaos, even global destruction, than on the side of anything resembling utopia (Marx, Engels). This is not an unfamiliar pessimism for us today. Indeed, Frederic Jameson referenced someone (likely himself)[1] who, at least as early as 2003, had remarked that “...it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism” (Jameson); and that sentiment of Jameson’s aphorism has served as the touchstone for some of the most popular works of cultural theory in the 21st century.[2]
From where did these sentiments arise? Well, pessimism about the future of our species has taken hold of our species’s collective spirit in recent decades in more sweeping proportion than in any epoch of history heretofore. It holds with the solidity of a vise grip that only strengthens with every Arab Spring done in from without or Thomas Sankara stamped-out from within; it batters and bruises in every fatiguing battle in the spiritual civil war between one’s generative faculties of hope and their unrelenting witness of consolidations in global geopolitical power and market control; it chokes out faith and hope as superhuman AI murder-seeking machines of actually existing warfare like The Gospel and Lavender bear witness to the feasibility that conspiracists prophesying about the harbingers of apocalypse (did somebody mention Palantir?) might actually be right. No longer does the prospect of a wise leader’s foresight, nor the prolific strength of a unified masses, seem to out-leverage the obstinacy and scarce numbers of the ruling class of our world. They now wield tremendous weaponry, digital infrastructure, and, perhaps most importantly, unity that only seem to accelerate in force in exponential proportion.
If I could perhaps speculate what the fear is that distinctively marks the contemporary cynicism, it is simply that we, the masses, are losing ground in the struggle for control; we are losing ground to the traditional capitalists and oligarchs in familiar ways, and we are losing ground in unfamiliar and worse ways too, as each successful attempt to deobfuscate the latest and greatest developments in financial engineering and military technology has shown us. We are losing ground to the planet we live on, the specific climate conditions of which are necessary for sustaining human life in the quality and quantity in which we have historically existed, and which are all but guaranteed to suffer irreversible wholesale transformation at the hands of anthropogenic contribution. We are losing ground, at least in the so-called Global North, to ideological demagogues whose surging far-right populisms capitalize on prevailing discontents by capturing them with “an image of catharsis, restorative justice; even revenge” far more coherent than left populisms tasked to swim upstream through state and corporate propaganda and repression. Not to mention, actualizing collective justice and categorically avoiding complicity in the capitalist system is now basically a contradiction a terms, and that is a serious problem for organizing in a culture that typically confers more weight in value to the semiotics of virtue than the ethical substance of it; in other words, whataboutism is an especially steep problem for leftists to overcome.
And so on; so it goes. Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World – it seems like a sensible idea to ground our attitude toward the present state of things. Indeed, Bifo gives a compelling argument for why that might be: letting go of investment in the truth allows for the transposition of cynicism with irony. For Bifo, borrowing from Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason, cynicism occurs when one is invested in a positive truth but has lost the hope that it will prevail, thus having decided to “...bend his head in front of the established reality and to accept the unacceptable: the immorality of the established reality” (Berardi Lecture 2). Being invested in that positive truth facilitates the cynic’s castration in the defeat of that truth and thus engenders sordidness – the feeling of a ubiquitous and ambiguous dirtiness and fakeness to reality. But Bifo ultimately diverges from Sloterdijk (who equates cynicism with irony in that they both effectuate the suspension of the possibility of truth actualized in reality) by distinguishing the ironic as someone “...who knows that there is no truth, that there is no fixed identity, that any compromise is fake. So they are not deceived, but there is already no search for truth, but an acceptance of nothing” (Berardi Lecture 2). Bifo advocates for an ironic orientation towards perceiving reality in the contemporary age, as it permits for an aesthetic sensibility for interpreting reality that, in its freedom from any need to establish a final truth, ironically allows for a more accurate methodology for “cartography” – an aesthetic mapping of signs and symptoms that can start nowhere, lead anywhere, and symptomize in any way.
So, in not expecting too much from the end of the world, we open the door to charting the contemporary world in a new way. With that in mind, I’d like to take that framework and direct it at the very premise whence it came: what exactly is signified when we mention the “end of the world”? One thing’s for sure: currents of sentiment run throughout the so-called “mainstreams” of society that certainly feel as if destruction, collapse, apocalypse – end, in a word – is approaching, whatever shape it might take. But the shape it will take remains in a vague space of indeterminacy. Will it be the end of the world in the sense of a physically uninhabitable planet? Will it be the elimination of the human species by the human species – at the hands of warmongering overlords, in their ever-increasing guest list for the mutually assured destruction party? Or will it be something unforeseen, like a flurry combo of catastrophes in an apocalyptic gumbo?
In each imagination of apocalypse, we envision a world and a global society alien from the one in which it exists now. But no matter how things actually play out, there will be no phenomenon that is distinct, wholesale, from the things we have experienced and continue to experience every day. No pandemic will be bleaker than the black plague or the spanish flu; no warfare will be more terrifying than that wrought upon Asia by Genghis Khan or the Pentagon, the latter of whom firebombed civilian cities with such passion that it effectively manufactured popular consent for the “morality” of their subsequent use of nuclear weapons; and, surely, there will be no subjection to authority will be crueler than the bondage that has shackled the enslaved people of every age who elude the storybook of humanity all while it continues to develop on their backs. Indeed, there have always been those people in so-called “Western” society whose lives were expendable, either in their finality as they are allowed to die or be killed, or in their actuality, as the way they are subjected to live (in bondage) remains a footnote to the biological fact that they are living. What, then, is really substantiating the feeling that the end of the world is coming? To my mind, the answer to that question is scale; first, however, it will be necessary to examine things at the micro-level.
Giorgio Agamben elaborates the notion of homo sacer (sacred man) as a politically unqualified Other whose subjection by power is justified by the belief in the way of the “good life” that individuals of the polis are committed to and to which the “bare” human life of homo sacer is opposed. Of course, the delineation of what exactly “bare life” denoted was and remains arbitrary; and, yet, modern Western politics was founded on this conception of “bare life” as always-already there in social beings (as in a baseline), while “good life” was conceived of as a metaphysical telos to which the polis seeks to transform “bare life” into, thus including those conceived of as bare life (everyone) while simultaneously excluding symptoms of bare life.
For Agamben, running through modern Western politics is the figure who, once guilty of crimes “warranting” exclusion from political right, one was deemed homo sacer, who could not be sacrificed (killed via formal ritual), but who could be killed by anyone with total legal impunity; “...Western politics first constitutes itself through an exclusion (which is simultaneously an inclusion) of bare life” (Agamben). In a globalized world of intergovernmental climate treaties, peace and justice courts, and trade organizations, homo sacer can be seen in every corner – in actual heat deaths raging in Western Europe, poor coastal towns that will be landless with nowhere to go, sprawling supply chains still employing mass unfree labor, and in the inaction or complicity of all those countries allowing Palestinians and Kashmiris to be killed. As long as the project of the “good life” exists for those who wield power, in the form of power consolidation and various forms of capital (a la Bourdieu) accumulation, there will always be those actions deemed necessary for its continuation at the expense of “bare life”; for instance, in the case of the US, the manufacturing of consent in state and corporate media for supplying weapons to Israel takes the shape of narratives around Israelis needing protection from Palestinian “terrorists” who lack sufficient reason and morality to be reasoned with. This is why Americans are supposed to be “okay” with the killing of Palestinians – political media effectively shapes Palestinians as homo sacer; “we” should not sacrifice them ourselves, but if Israelis in apparent need of protection of their homeland and civilians kill them, then that is okay. Of course, as we know, Israel has served as a valuable proxy for the expansion and dominion of Western capital since WWII.
For all of us fortunate enough to have evaded the fate of being the direct object of the horrors of humanity at the behest of capital, anxieties of the future have been broaching territory that we had perhaps believed would not be penetrated: our own lives. Climate change will not play geographic favorites, for instance, and states have shown time and again, as social media has made widely known, that they will deliberately repress activists at home fighting against the imperative to growth of capitalism, such as anti-imperialists, anti-capitalists fighting against the dispossession of public resources, and environmentalists fighting for degrowth. As we see capitalists and neoliberal states privatize and marketize foundational necessities of life such as healthcare, water, and air all while quality and accessibility deteriorate, each failed resistance seems to carry greater and greater stakes (Jaffee and Newman, Stuart et al.). It’s not that great health or clean drinking water have ever existed universally, but, rather, that we have all seen these ideals actualized and thus know that we have the knowledge and resources sufficient for greater human flourishing. Instead, for each battle against capital won, there are several lost, and hope falls as the scale of market structure/infrastructure grows.
There’s that word again, ‘scale’. But why does scale matter so much for the feeling of the end of the world? In their inception, markets were meant to serve and be embedded in the logic of social life in society (as Adam Smith presupposed for his theory of the invisible hand to hold true), but each victory of global capital and each advance in technology increasingly threaten and chips at that order of embeddedness (Smith). Indeed, the neoliberal age is perhaps most distinctively marked by the wholesale capture of liberal state actors, whose ostensible purpose is to represent the will of people, by market logics, thereby reversing the direction of embeddedness and subordinating social needs to purely economic goals. Karl Polanyi, in his seminal work The Great Transformation, characterized the movement of capital as the effort to carry out this very reversal of embeddedness through accumulation by dispossession of resources and consolidation of state and market power, while the counter-movement of groups and individuals was the effort to re-embed the market in its rightful position – as subordinate to the social in the final instance. As we have in the neoliberal age of market capture, it is scale that is decisive in the long term, for power of purchase begets power to rule; the economic power of Western states supplies the military power that enforces the repression of counter-movements and the coercion of non-capitalist states into liberalization, as late 20th century trade agreements and structural adjustment programs evidenced. This is an instructive example of Foucault’s theory of power/knowledge, as the character of coercion of capitalist power is one that necessitates a transformation from any sort of normative-oriented rationality (value-rational, a la Max Weber) to a market-oriented rationality (instrumental-rational): compete in the market or die. It’s worth, here, to do an analysis contemporary geopolitics through Agamben’s theory of homo sacer: with the conquest of capital that simultaneously demands capitulation to market logics results a cultural hegemony that aligns the “good life” with the sacred ideals of capitalism (e.g., growth, profitability, consumption, etc.), normative ideals are increasingly associated with “bare life”, and, although liberal capitalists won’t “kill” you, your subservience or even death at the hands of the market will be justified.
The end of the world we fear is not some wholly unfamiliar state of affairs off in the future; indeed, we should heed the book of Ecclesiastes, which said that “there is nothing new under the sun”. It is more like the feeling we have now, of the death of a hope we have had of what our collective reality could be. As capitalist movement scales the embeddedness of society in the logic of the market and ever-more convincingly crushes counter-movements from within the West (for the market’s dominion is far less certain in other parts of the world), we lose the paths to futures that seem viable to live and be content in, much less flourish. Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology is instructive – that our being in the present is shaped by the futures we procure based on the narratives of the past we identify with (nostalgic spectres), those futures become the heuristics against which we measure our experience and orient the aspects of reality we invest interest in, and the loss of futures (spectres of an aborted future) in submission to reality become affective determinants in turn (Derrida 1994). The stories of folk heroes old, the stories we tell each other, the dominant histories that are shaped as they are told by various medias, and the affective charge coursing through all of it – these, for Derrida, are the spectralising forces, “...neither living nor dead, present nor absent…” that fashion the “oceanic feeling” that Freud spoke of (ibid).
Let’s return to Bifo’s question from the beginning, with our own addendum: what can we do, in the continuing present, to answer the question: how will we survive? Well, if the “end of the world” is more precisely understood as the present collective affective phenomenon that the past and our collective experiences of it have purchased, perhaps the answer to making new futures is to look within, at the individual level. After all, the future is made in our own image; it escapes everything but our own imagina-tion in the final instance. Deleuze and Guattari, in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, might be helpful in refashioning the “good life”. Their concepts of majority and minority elude quantitative scale, but instead comprise affective territory that stands in a relation to the hegemonic regime/order of representation; the minority are found in the immigrants, living in a language that is not theirs, and even in the minor literature of Kafka and Proust, who found fascination not in the major side of life that lays down the standards of decorum, but in the worlds and languages of servants and employees. The minority are the ones who have long grappled with the reality that we are now confronting as the world seemingly ends; they are the ones who have built minor worlds, languages, literatures, and relations to the major – this is alternative affective territory. The call is to “Create the opposite dream: know how to create a becoming-minor,” which abandons all positive identification with conquest, with dominion, with the “spreading” of justice; “There is nothing that is major or revolutionary exept (sic) the minor. To hate all languages of masters” (Deleuze and Guattari).
Therein, for Jacques Ranciere, we find the key to our own emancipation in these times, and in all times. The minority, hating the languages of mastery and decorum – yes, even the idea of “good life” in itself –, is already liberated. Thus it is not the I plodding through the vicious cycle of critique of a world and a species in which perfection doesn’t exist, who is free. But it is the I who revolutionizes my perceptual aesthetics to carry out an “emergence from a state of minority” that is emancipated (Ranciere). But the minority is not “out there”. It is in the subject who is at once the emancipator of their own emancipation – all along, it is my very investment in the major in which the kernel of my capacity to tear it asunder inhered.
I asked Bifo a question ahead of one of his lectures; it concerned the viability of mutual aid, which in my mind was and is the most radical forms of resistance and care in this age, though its scalability – both with reference to reach and power – appears wildly insufficient to many on the outside who I tell about it. His reply, before recounting the story that I began this paper with and introducing Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, was “Yes, absolutely. I do not see anything else than [mutual aid] (sic)” (Berardi Lecture 3). Toiling hours every week so I can stand on the street supplying unhoused Angelenos to grab free emergency blankets and narcans, much like Kafka who apparently writes on and on of the banality of the servant’s life, or the immigrant who fumbles with the lingua franca, might seem like futile endeavors. But, to me, that is simply a spectator for which the minority has not yet emerged in its beautiful fullness. The minority emancipation might not change much, but what is guaranteed is that it is a radical shift that is always available everywhere, for everyone: in other words, do not expect too much from the end of your world.
References
Agamben, Giorgio. (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Berardi, Franco. (2025). “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World.” Lectures at the Global Center for Advanced Studies.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis, MN: Minneapolis University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. (1994). Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning & the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Routledge.
Jaffee, D., and Newman, S. (2012). “A Bottle Half Empty: Bottled Water, Commodification, and Contestation.” Organization & Environment, 26(3): 318-335. https://doi.org/10.1177/1086026612462378.
Jameson, Frederic. (2003). “Future City.” New Left Review, 21:65-79.
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. (1848). The Communist Manifesto.
Ranciere, Jacques. (2011). The Emancipated Spectator. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London, UK: Verso Books.
Stuart, D., Gunderson, R., and Petersen, B. (2017). “Climate Change and the Polanyian Counter-movement: Carbon Markets or Degrowth?” New Political Economy, 24(1): 89–102. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2017.1417364.
Notes
[1] In "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1989), Jameson wrote: “It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations. I have come to think that the word postmodern ought to be reserved for thoughts of this kind” (emphasis added).
[2] See Fisher’s Capitalism Realism, which has undeniably shaped the so-called “online left” more than any academic work of theory this century. Additionally, see Zizek’s The Spectre of Ideology.