"I don’t think that we will be able to win a fight against financial capitalism by demonstrating in the street. Destroying banks isn’t useful if we are seeking emancipation from financial dictatorship. Financial power does not exist in the banks; it is embedded in software, in the techno-linguistic automatisms that govern daily life and the psychic automatisms of consumerism, competition and fear. Nevertheless we are in the midst of a process – a movement – that will deploy itself over the course of the next decade, maybe longer, and we have to start from where we are and what we know. What we have today is the memory of past forms that our movements have taken, including occupations, strikes and demonstrations, both peaceful and violent. All of these are part of the legacy of 20th century social movements. Recently, we have tried to resurrect some of these old forms of struggle – these old forms of expression – but this hasn’t worked particularly well. Established forms of peaceful demonstration have absolutely no possibility of changing the politics of financial capitalism. They don’t work when democracy is dead – and it is totally dead, the European experience is demonstrating that clearly. But on the other hand, violent riots or bank bombings are also useless because they don’t challenge the sites of real power. Real power is in the cybersphere, in the algorithms of financial control, in the quantitative analyses that undergird trading, and so on."
Reactivating the Social Body in Insurrectionary Times: A Dialogue with Franco 'Bifo' Beradi
