The Second Coming

This book does not teach you how to create communist memes, nor does it herald the second coming of Jesus Christ.

In 2016, AlphaGo shocked the world by defeating top human players, and the White House released Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence.

That same year, the formerly colonised Islamic world experienced rampant civil wars, with suicide-driven militant groups regularly launching terrorist attacks in European cities. In the West, white populations, gripped by fear of economic decline and global conflicts, manifested their anxieties as Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, the spread of mental anguish, and a surge in indiscriminate killings.

As the era of advanced technology and automation arrives, the result seems to be an imminent “end of history”: information overload drives people to despair, the dehumanisation of automation combines with the dysfunction of universal politics and humanity’s thirst for revenge, and the efficiency of Nazi-style mechanised extermination reaches unprecedented levels.

The second coming isn’t salvation, but a technologically enhanced version of racism and fascism.

In response, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, a renowned Italian leftist philosopher who has been active in the spheres of social movements, media, and techno-political thought for six decades, revives the vision of communist internationalism: overcoming national, religious, and racial divides by uniting Western workers and billions of people scarred by colonial history under the political identity of the “exploited worker.”

Bifo calls for the meme-like second coming of communism on the eve of the apocalypse: a resurgence using symbols, words, images, and gestures that are easy to replicate and remember, re-emerging in the post-apocalyptic world. This is not about ideology but about steering technology and automation towards liberating social time and creating pathways to equality.