crisis

Have you present the Panamanian wasps?
by Antonio Cardella

Perhaps also this time they will be able to stem the crisis, to prevent the collapse of the system. But the costs are already high. It comes back to mind the example of those insects, which it was thought that...

At the opening of his essay Ethics in a world of consumers (Yale University Press, 2010), Zygmunt Bauman tells of a group of researchers at the Zoological Society of London who travels to Panama to study the social life of local wasps. The prejudice that was supposed to be confirmed by the results of research, among other things, was that each insect had no other space-time limit than that of its hive, in which each member was born, grew, and was voted to the assigned function. There was then an exterior that is not the search of pollen.
It was great, therefore, surprised when the expensive sensors applied to the wasps showed a very different reality. There was a nomadic spread of insects that are transferred from one hive to another without the transfer would create any problems, or hive of departure nor the date of arrival. In the new community was part of the wasp nomad with no problems, ready to do its part for the benefit of all.
Demonstration of a very significant companies - one of the Panamanian wasps - mobile and welcoming, willing to explore beyond the boundaries of birth and to welcome with open minds who are different.
I remember the opening words of this assay to detect Bauman as our societies evolve in the opposite direction, unfortunately. Our communities are increasingly closed: relations are reduced to the essentials, locked the doors to protect our belief in the individual from a perceived external hostility. The consumer society, globalization that exalts selfishness made us surly and suspicious: we feel our neighbor as an entity dangerously inclined to shirk anything, to undermine the precarious as part of our state.
They fell the remaining illusions about the feasibility of our legal systems and social democracy, this system of rules that would gradually expand the spaces of freedom and justice for all individuals in the industrialized West, trudging over two centuries, never really accomplished, constantly revisited by political regimes more or less oppressive, whose needs for survival and diverge increasingly diverged sharply from the spirit of the constituents.
The fact is - and is under the eyes of all - that the liberal drift, with the deification of the market, the competition without rules, the proliferation of parasitic annuities, or purely speculative position, exalted all forms of selfishness, individual and collective, rendering the individual increasingly hostile neighbor, a neighbor who pressed the boundaries of the community of belonging or even just the front door.
In this condition of segregation psychologically annihilating generalized in which individuals and communities to feel constantly under siege, it is inevitable that skip even the most ordinary rules of coexistence and break relations between the basic social institutions, without, however, that the tear is able to produce new and credible forms of aggregation.

The sad inventory of the victims

This is especially true in society as they are now blocked the entire West. The paradigmatic example of this is that we are experiencing the crisis and do not save any of the liberal-democratic countries of the matrix.
In terms of disaster management could not be greater. It is certainly true that a proportion of the population of the planet has experienced seasons of apparent prosperity, but in the meantime, we are talking about, in the most optimistic of cases, only 800 million kissed by luck of the 6 billion plus people that populate our world and then, if you evaluate the long breath of history, it was a prosperity that has come to enhance the social conflicts, resulting in huge pockets of poverty and irreversible damage to the environment.

In terms of economic dynamics, the western world is screwed into a spiral in which the cyclical crises are inevitable, attempts to produce embankment that, in the medium term, progressively worsen the overall condition of the system: the oil crisis of 1973 to the last and financial, of 2007 has been a steady deterioration of economic and social conditions of the countries of the Old and New World capitalism. The approximately 70 million unemployed people who complain about America and Europe produce a crisis of consumption, which depresses the manufacturing processes and triggers recession biting its own tail. On the other hand, the attempt to reverse the trend with the release of reserve funding (cumulative, ie, to contain any regional emergencies) is likely to produce uncontrolled inflationary tendencies which, in turn, are likely to further depress the context. The criterion to rescue the banks to consolidate their balance sheets and enable them to exercise properly credit, it would make sense if the manufacturing base at this stage require resources to increase their production with technology upgrades and expansion of market policies. But in the meantime, the rates at which banks offer credit are everywhere and then exorbitant - factors - the internal markets of individual countries under capitalism are no longer able to absorb existing production and foreign markets are becoming less accessible for rapid adaptation of the indigenous production of goods and services to meet the needs of individual populations.

It is possible that this time - it is difficult to predict the when - be able to stem the crisis and prevent the collapse of the entire system, but in the meantime, we have to keep up to date inventory of the sad victims and - worse - to evaluate debts, in terms of sustainability of the system, but, above all, moral and social degradation, we leave a legacy for new generations to come. The faults in the last hundred years we have caused with our way, perversely, to be alive, are difficult to quantify and, therefore, it is impossible to determine how long a virtuous next generation - if it arises and puts his hand immediately reverse the our tendencies - be able to begin the process of aggregation models for different and hopefully better than the current.
Of course, if we think of waste products and pollution levels in the environment that we lived, forecasts, according to the current state of scientific and technological research, can only be annihilating. Just think for centuries needed to exhaust the fumes of the deadly remnants of nuclear fusion, the desertification of entire areas of the planet, deforestation, pollution of the oceans and the disappearance of entire species of animals due to the work of man, we think all this and see if we can watch our children without being forced to lower his eyes to an overwhelming sense of guilt.

‘68 lost opportunity

As an anarchist, I feel guilty the rest of the world, because many of the faults that are under the eyes of all were provided by our masters, whose struggle against all forms of power included the need to develop forms of solidarity which prevented the conflicts for the survival and proliferation of perverse ideologies, secular and religious, mainly responsible for a world that excludes any form of diversity and enhances the alleged supremacy and racial identity.
My generation has certainly lost a unique opportunity to critically revisit the structure of bourgeois society during this extraordinary movement of revolt which was the sixty-eight. Many of us had thought that you were taking a path - of thought and action - designed to undermine the established principles of a society profoundly unjust, oppressive, increasingly oriented to restrict the space of freedom, tends to reduce people to a kind a bottomless pit from which rake resources to maintain a power structure that, in addition to being corrupt by definition, visual navigation, restructuring liturgies now out of time to support dynamic capitalist economic unjust and contradictory.
In fact, they had underestimated the capacity of the system to regenerate its own with the help of substantial fringes of the movement attracted by the idea that, somehow occupying the space offered by their institutions, could change from within the structures of power. That anarchists had understood the game and had not responded to the call of these sirens, not enough to console us.

At that crucial juncture we have lost many fellow travelers, many were overwhelmed by the demands of everyday life, someone has found refuge in the ivory tower of theoretical elaboration comforting others, the worst, they are still in the service of masters unclean.
We have to start all over again knowing that our message libertarian does not want to fade - should be entrusted to the young, to women and men still in the grass is not totally corrupted by a culture - which is also that of generations of past decades - unable in fact, to shake off the dross of the logic of power.
We need to find new paths, less trust and capitalize on opportunities to acquire consents only attending events, meetings, convocations, which also come from sectors of the opposition to existing governments and resume the habit of interviews with people who suffer in the flesh the discomfort of living in social-economic-political context of our time. We need to regain contact with the land close to each one of us, reinterpreting the relationship and correctly use the resources. We should certainly make use of the most modern means of communication, however, without believing that they can replace the physical meeting, directed, which remains the most complete and leads to human time. The cadences of a conversation between human beings physically present, the pauses, the winks, the overtones, the looks are all essential components because we fully intend to. The summonses, appeals, solidarity may well use the ether or the thread, but then there's the square that lies ahead, as demonstrated once again the youth of Cairo, Tunis and Damascus. It is in that place that must be recognized immediately, exchanging signals tested, hissing slogans that have no need of interpretation.

Confronting without bias

And so back to the Panamanians wasps, of which I spoke at the beginning of my contribution. Never as in this climate there is Italian, urgent need of somewhere else, to some extent cleared of degradation with which we are forced to live with. An elsewhere is hard to define because it is felt everywhere, in the Western world, but not limited to, a distrust, if not outright rejection from people outside their community, a stranger almost always perceived as a source of danger. Yet nomadism, the ability to deal with different realities without bias, even far from us, is the only way to build a humanity less precarious, more cohesive than that in which the fate has reduced us to live. We too must look for other hives.

Antonio Cardella