society

Actuality of Proudhon
by Antonio Cardella

Drawing on the writings of French philosopher and reflections of two centuries ago, can offer a few pleasant surprises.

 

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ot met for some time: busy on several fronts, Franco La Rosa has been the primary of psychiatry in various public and private health facilities, currently runs a successful training center in the field. Yunga of iron, is also lovable character, brilliant conversationalist and, especially, has a critically engaged in many areas of contemporary culture. His phone call at lunchtime one day of spring just passed did not surprise me: we used to feel from time to time to comment on the events of daily life in a city, Palermo, with an illustrious past but in this very precarious, inserted unmentionable in a context of political-mafia interests that make local and national, in the eyes of observers, not superficial, irredeemable. I was surprised, however, by his proposal that ended our conversation: "I think - I said - you should come and talk of anarchy at the University that I direct and which conducts his seminars on the Friday of each week at the Cefalu Cathedral in Cefalù. I was frankly surprised, to treat a subject so difficult, in the collective relegated as part of a visionary, rebellious, or even violent, would have groped to demolish the thick walls of a castle built in the time of prejudice and misinformation are difficult to dismantle within a few more or less academic talkings. The more I thought, though, I liked to accept this sort of challenge, to find a logical order of exposure is not easy because it is addressed to an audience which knew no social background, level of historical culture and the degree of political information. I offered my willingness to Franco and I found myself on May 13 last in the conference room of the beautiful Cefalu Cathedral in Cefalù to speak of anarchy to an audience of about seventy people, mostly teachers and workers. Introduced by a polite presentation of a distinguished gentleman who I later learned, was the prince of the tribunal recently retired, I was immediately surprised by the attentive silence of an audience who wanted to understand quickly that I was kind of rare animal and what kind of language I speak. I put well by the notes that I had brought with me and decided to tackle some specific subjects, historical and theoretical in nature that were the origin of libertarian thought, and yet they are, mutatis mutandis, the rib carrier.

Because some reflections on the origins of the anarchist thought are surprisingly up back in the contemporary world, I want to propose also to you in this article that I must necessarily be within acceptable limits for the nature of the magazine that these reflections will kindly host. Discounted Enlightenment and the origins of socialist thought the mid-nineteenth century, we encounter once in the figure, in my opinion essential, Proudhon and his thoughts on the concept of dialectics, from which flows a whole series of consequences that the French thinker analyzes with precise doctrine. The challenge to the Hegelian dialectic of the third proposition (synthesis) is the starting point of Proudhon thought. He argues that the contradictions, conflicts, competition does not even have conflicting serial events that must unfold their full potential, without being crystallized from synthesis (preconceived compositions) that end up being mandatory conditions incompatible with the free flow of life . It is no coincidence that, for Hegel, the synthesis of more objective Spirit and the Prussian state (note, this one, from the editor).

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

The socialized property

But to come to our time, this alleged need for the composition of the contrasts is the basis of theoretical and organizational constructs on which the raison d'être of all States. Politics, in the original etymology, indicated the place where a particular community gathered to establish its own rules of living together and gradually discover the meaning to give to their being together. The presence of all members of the community in times shareholders' meeting to ensure respect for all individuals and groups expressed. It was, in short, self management marked, not by laws which crystallized in a real-time fixity of unnatural and oppressive, but by the transitional rules, valid only for the time within which the rules laid down appeared to be in need. Then these rules were replaced in whole or in part, in harmony with the changing needs of the community. Therefore, any form of delegation that would allow the emergence of charismatic or powerful groups whose will could go over the heads of individuals, but to get rid of mutual functions that ensure the continued progress of the community dedicated to equality and solidarity. In a well structured environment, but to me forcibly synthesized by Proudhon described in hundreds of pages for the extraordinary power of a compelling logic and the fluidity and beauty of a well-articulated and persuasive language, individual ownership of resources would be selfish to a subtraction community, then a theft. Quite the opposite is the discourse on socialized property, the accumulation of resources produced and managed collectively, available for all initiatives related to the common interest. The release of excess resources on meeting the needs of individuals (the surplus produced by the collective work), according to Proudhon would have to merge into a bank of free credit available for any new business venture and shared, and for the construction of necessary infrastructure. This bank of free credit was a proposal which occupied all the first Congress of the First International in 1866 from Geneva, Lausanne '67 to the next and finally at the Basle Congress of '69, in which the proposal was ratified. This identity politics with the complex articulation of a particular community is shattered by the declination of the concept of policy prevailing in modernity. The modernization - Salvo Vaccaro writes in his book, Cruciverba, Edizioni Zero in condotta, Milan 2001, pag.134) has broken the political dividing it into the political sphere itself (mainly technical), social sphere, the administrative sphere, economic sphere , each with its autonomy and interdependence. The differentiation poses new problems of synchronization of the various movements, triggering a race to the government of the time under a single domain of the overall time. Breaking policy, this has become the name of the State, the style of institutionalization, the sign imprinted with the words and order things, to bodies like minds ... From this fragmentation of the political fragmentation of the individual inevitably arises, the which reduces its complexity to the role that an existential state assigns the structure in a vertically organized social ladder. It 'a split, this, that alienates the relationship with the outside world and dissociates from the individual's identity: he becomes a subject, a simple number on which you play the farce of misleading statistics. Moreover, the distribution policy of separate spheres causes of individual processes of self-institutionalized sectors which eventually dissociate into their original autoreproductive strategy. In other words, the institutionalized individual spheres have gradually become more attentive to increase their share of power in society, rather than providing services to the society for which the structure has been created. This process is particularly evident in Italy today (but is not a phenomenon exclusively Italian). At all levels of the public sphere is standard practice, by governments, political parties and various gatherings, occupying various bureaucratic and administrative and economic and financial structures in order to consolidate their own advantage and beyond the vicissitudes of political hubs decisive for the survival of the society. But this aspect of the institutions of self is particularly evident in the sector of production activities. We call the world evolved, the more industrialized, that the Western world, from products that is buried, at best, are consumed voraciously and, at worst, they are transformed directly into waste. We are flooded with waste, but what is worse, the waste has become explicit element of the production logic of capitalism. The production of consumer goods and services in the world in which we are immersed more and more has come away with the actual needs of the community: it tends only to artificially create the conditions for a subsequent production process. With scientific precision, every product has a functional pre-established time, beyond which it must give way to a new product of the same kind of life usually shorter than the previous one.

Wealth and poverty

Certainly Proudhon could not foresee the process of involution of capitalism that has led to degenerative diseases such as to create more problems than it can solve. He could not foresee that the financial results to prevail on the production, paper money that makes the dynamics of money and time so accelerated by making any investment unproductive in the production of goods and services. Which, again, will be important components of the global market but only to the extent that companies that produce them will enroll in equity for speculation on the stock exchange. The Parmalat case is illuminating in this sense: there was the production, the market was in surplus, but the stock game, conducted with criminal recklessness, ended up burying the Company. Skeletons of this type are the closets full of large Italian companies, which, for groped back to the accounts, or to restructure or relocate wild, pouring into the social fabric of the burden of increasing unemployment. One thing, of course, Proudhon had expected: that poverty would grow with the growth rate of capital accumulation. I do not think it is necessary to disturb the obscurities of political economy to see how the volume of the wealth accumulated by an increasingly insignificant part of the world population will grow with the growing misery of increasingly large areas virtually desertified.