Futur Anterieur

Futur Anterieur

The journal was born out of the emotion of the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989. The question which the founding group posed for themselves was: how to reconstruct – not simply how to ‘refound’ – an experience of communism. All the founders of Futur Antérieur came out of the experience of ’68 – some from the French experience, some from the Italian.

It analysed and documented the process of constitution of struggles, from those of the immigrants in the mid-1980s, to the upsurge of the social proletariat of Paris against the first attempts at privatisation by the city council. The great importance of this period of movement was that, on the one hand, it opened a window on the conjuncture that was about to begin, towards the problems that were to characterise the global era of neo-liberalism; on the other, it expressed and highlighted the new characteristics of living labour. The analysis of the conjuncture was profoundly intertwined with theoretical analysis, so that, beginning with the crisis which intensified between the 1980s and the 1990s, it was able to make statements about the new nature of productive labour.

In Futur antérieur, the attention to the cultural and political genesis of postmodernity was accompanied by an analysis of the subjects located within the changing nature of labour in the regimes of postmodernity. Immaterial labour, precarious labour, the subsumption of affective labour within and beneath the productive potential of capitalism, the transformation of social cooperation into a fundamental element of value creation – all this became a crucial element of research and theoretical analysis.