"Radicalism should abandon the mode of activism, and adopt a passive mode." (Image by Mary Ellen Mark.)

There may be a system better than regulated capitalism, but what is it? The marketplace can be a beast, but how else can we share wealth, both of information and materially? The system is corrupting and we must resist it to some extent even as we participate in it, but other alternatives are far worse. From Malcolm Harris’s writings on The State about anti-capitalist scholar Franco Berardi, who advocates the dubious strategy of resistance through lethargy:

“Of the anti-capitalist scholars and intellectuals who prescribe a political program, Franco Berardi might have the most counter-intuitive ideas. In his many articles, books, and lectures, Berardi pushes a curious line against a mind-warping market culture. During the current period of youth-led urban unrest, Berardi has consistently preached a resistance strategy that emulates the process of aging. While capital says go faster, make more, consume more, his call for ‘senilization’ says slow down, work less, consume less. Berardi wants a detox from capitalism’s psyche-damaging relations, and it’s not just a metaphor. Put down the Adderall, roll a joint. Relax.

In a new formulation he calls ‘post-futurism,’ Berardi poses the Futurist fetishization of muscular youth against ‘the force of exhaustion, of facing the inevitable with grace, discovering the sensuous slowness of those who do not expect any more from life than wisdom.’ We have enough things, he writes; what we really want is more time in which to flourish. In his heterodoxy, Berardi has broken one of the cardinal rules of Marxism: revolution as the necessary mode of social transformation. ‘Radicalism,’ he writes, ‘should abandon the mode of activism, and adopt a passive mode.’ Fewer marches, more mahjong.”