According to a Eurostat survey, 1.5 million Italian employees, equivalent to 6.2% of the workforce, work more than 50 hours a week, far beyond the standard 40. Among the self-employed, many of whom are effectively bogus VAT-registered contractors, that figure rises to almost one in three. This trend is steadily growing, placing Italy among the European countries where people work the longest hours, while wages have remained stagnant for thirty years and continue to be eroded by inflation. Against this backdrop, it is hardly surprising that 53% of Italian workers report feeling stressed, 27% experienced “intense sadness” during their most recent working day, and only 7% say they are happy in their workplace.
Now imagine instead being able to work 24 hours a week, spread across four days, with a minimum net wage of €15 an hour, amounting to €1,560 a month, as well as an unconditional universal basic income of €500 a month. In Italy, proposals as radical, and almost unbelievable, as these are being heard with increasing frequency amid widespread dissatisfaction with work and quality of life, for which no credible solutions appear to be on the horizon. Issues such as reducing working hours or making essential services free have recently gained a small foothold in the public debate. The credit, however, does not belong to the traditional left-wing parties, but to a heterogeneous and difficult-to-classify movement inspired by the ideas of the eclectic British intellectual Mark Fisher, who died prematurely in 2017, and by the circle of scholars around him.
In his work, Fisher described better than anyone else the condition of a world in which neoliberalism’s victory had erased every alternative future, leaving human beings trapped in endless work and threatened by anxiety and depression. First as a member of the CCRU, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick, and later through his acclaimed blog K-punk, Fisher helped lay the foundations of left-wing accelerationist thought by reworking the Marxist tradition. Left accelerationism, abbreviated as L/Acc, took on its fully developed form in 2013 with Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek’s Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics, followed by their book Inventing the Future. The theory originally emerged in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and the failure of movements against inequality, from Occupy Wall Street in the United States to the Onda movement in Italy. It proposed a post-work society in which technological automation would be placed at the service of society. At its core lies the concept of hyperstition: a narrative about the future that shapes actions in the present like a self-fulfilling prophecy and ultimately brings itself into existence.
Paradoxically, in Italy, the ideas of Fisher and his associates began to circulate only after his death, when the publishing house NERO released the first Italian translation of his best-known work, Capitalist Realism, in 2018. Originally published in English in 2009, the book quickly became a contemporary classic in Italy as well. As NERO editor Valerio Mattioli wrote in his preface to the Italian edition, Fisher managed to speak to an entire generation and its anxieties. He continues to do so, as his ideas about moving beyond capitalism still display a surprising vitality today.
What makes the Italian case distinctive is that Fisherian thought spread extensively as an imaginary and a sensibility through online communities and grassroots practices before it circulated through books, academic papers or institutional debates. Social media pages such as Automatizzato comunismo memetico and Facebook groups such as Il Sinistralibro disseminated Fisher’s ideas through brightly coloured graphics and provocative slogans. This broad campaign of memetic propaganda sought to modernise the aesthetics of the radical Left and expand the “Overton window” of topics considered acceptable within political debate. In recent years, several collectives have emerged around these impulses, including the Circolo Nomade Accelerazionista, Inventare il futuro, named after the book of the same title, and Collettivo La Zero. They have begun moving from memes to action, becoming laboratories in which the imagination can be liberated and used to shape a desirable tomorrow.
Desire itself, a concept that became increasingly marginal to the Left from the late 1970s onwards, has been chosen as the cornerstone of this new political project. Its aim is to wrest desire from the grip of capitalist consumption and transform it into an engine of change. Abundance, pleasure and leisure are no longer regarded as individual aspirations, but as the foundations of a new model commonly described as “luxury communism”, in which luxury ceases to be a privilege reserved for the few and becomes a right guaranteed to everyone.
Unlike British accelerationism, which is primarily framed as a theory of technology, the movement taking shape in Italy has a “free-provisionist” character, as explained by economist Davide Dibitonto, one of its most prominent figures. Drawing partly on an anarchist tradition, the Italian current identifies the free provision of six fundamental needs, housing, utilities, food, transport, healthcare and education, as “the real instrument for breaking the coercive power of wage labour at its root” and transforming existing society into a “society of care” capable of fully enjoying the abundance it produces. At present, meanwhile, 0.1% of Italy’s population controls more than €1 trillion. As an article published by Xenowiki, one of the voices within Italy’s accelerationist constellation, argues, “if, despite advanced automation and the explosion in productivity, we continue to work 40 or 48 hours a week, it is not because doing so is necessary, but because capitalism must keep its founding myth alive: scarcity.” If scarcity disappeared, “the entire architecture of domination” would collapse.
According to this interpretation, once we are no longer forced to work in order to meet our basic needs, money will lose its coercive power, social bonds will flourish and mutual care will become unconditional. Freed from the costs of survival, from life as a subscription service, we will finally be able to afford the luxury of cultivating our passions and fulfilling our deepest desires. It would mark a transition, to quote Fisher himself, “from work that never ends to endless free time.” In this sense, the proposed acceleration amounts to an anthropological transformation or, in Dibitonto’s words, “a cultural leap between species” capable of saving us “from a collapsing world.”
As for the role of technology, while both right-wing and left-wing accelerationism are openly technophile, with Williams and Srnicek’s manifesto advocating full automation, the Italian reinterpretation proposes a different approach. Contemporary technological development is seen as evidence that we already live in a society of abundance, however unequally that abundance may be distributed. The solution, however, is not to place blind faith in today’s infrastructure, which is both extractive in nature and an instrument of oppression, but to reimagine it from the ground up according to Solarpunk principles. What emerges on the horizon is free and open-source technology adapted to a post-scarcity society. “We do not want this technology to be placed at the service of the common good,” Dibitonto explains. “We want a different technology altogether, one that still has to be imagined and invented.”
To give these ideas a more concrete form, the first national, or rather translocal, free-provisionist gatherings have been organised in recent years, alongside the technical planning of the futures they envision. According to its organisers, the Mark Fisher Party, held in July between Latina and Rome, was neither simply a festival nor merely a commemoration. It was an attempt to keep the “Fisher function” active, to borrow Mattioli’s phrase: the collection of theoretical and practical tools left behind by the British philosopher for intervening in reality. In Inventing the Future, Williams and Srnicek write that “during a crisis, the actions that can be taken depend on the ideas that are available.” They add that their primary function is precisely to “develop alternatives to existing policies and keep them alive and available until what is considered politically impossible today becomes inevitable.”
The most emblematic example of a hyperstition inspired by Fisher’s thought is the Capybara Party. For now, it remains far removed from the structure of a traditional political party, but its programme is as provocative, featuring a shorter working week, universal basic income and free services, as it is rigorous in terms of technical feasibility. The movement harnesses the power of its disorienting name, with the capybara serving both as an icon of pleasure and as a “glitch” in the system, to attract attention before demonstrating, with figures to support its case, that its demands could genuinely be implemented. As Dibitonto observes, “this programme is considered unrealistic only when viewed through the lens of capitalist realism.”
Developed by a REPA, or Open Planning Network, made up of economists, experts and scholars, the party’s flagship proposal is the 24-Hour Reform. It begins with a radical fiscal shift: a tax-free threshold of up to €20,280, a cap on personal wealth and the transfer of the tax burden from labour to large investment incomes, allowing everyone to work less. The complete technical plan will be published in a book due to reach shops in September, while other REPAs are already working on reforms to healthcare and the prison system. A signature campaign has also recently begun, with more than 110,000 signatures required to register the party officially. For a utopia, it all seems remarkably real.
Tommaso Meo