rivista anarchica
anno 41 n. 363
giugno 2011


social trasformation

Restarting from below
byAndrea Papi

Acting within the ganglia of the system to reform it has always been groped for bankruptcy. There are other roads to try to go.

 

I wonder why in the world in spite of everything seems to move fairly quickly, throwing signs of changes in some cases momentous as in North Africa, unlike in Italy we live the constant feeling of immobility which makes it seem like we were not even part of the world. For us the situation seems really stagnant, even permanent, not because everything works perfectly, since practically nothing really works, while the prospects we face are nothing short of depressing and demeaning.
The feeling one gets is clear that we are experiencing a decline that seems unstoppable at the moment, at every level and extended to all areas, from political to economic to social. Personally I am more than convinced that this degradation, a real action in progress, is a real fact more than just a feeling. I am also convinced that it is not random, but the logical consequence of a series of fundamental choices to be desired especially in the last decades provided the predominant cultural elements of great power and great ability to influence. As a whole our society today is locked up in their fears and obtuse in understanding the world, is incapable of thinking of wanting to be as innovative and as the emergence of a common spirit that can make us stand up and make us feel proud of our being and of our work. From the global historical cultural landmark we have become a rearguard of common sense, frozen in a permanent retreat from the whole of creation.
Yet it isn't missing the richness, especially monetary, which is increasingly the preserve of a mere privileged minority, to the detriment of all others. The vast majority of the population must be enmeshed in a destructive spiral of constant and widespread cultural impoverishment, one step after another is losing every victory and every possibility of being. What the ruling classes of our house were able to distinguish is the progressive and constant public debt, calculated by subtracting consistent with scientific and powerless citizens of the little personal well-being that they had managed to scrape together with hard work, allowed the privileged's enrichment. These power-hungry sharks have squandered and continue to squander the heritage society without solving virtually any problem and without improving the living conditions. So from birth each of us has on his back a debt of tens of thousands of euro, without being liable, inter alia, to own anything and without having to face reassuring existential perspective. Indeed!

The fight for emancipation

If proof was needed to demonstrate the complete failure of understanding of how to manage public affairs, well here it is: it is in fact and results of the work of these gentlemen, who, despite their systematic flasks, remain oblivious to give themselves super / lavish salaries, establishing for themselves that should be rewarded for the shambles that they are responsible. They have demonstrated and are demonstrating that the social origin of the theft is not so much private property as it's the expropriation and imposition of hierarchical management of public goods. They get rich and we get poor, without a discontinuity.
This progressive deterioration of social action could settle because it was carefully prepared as desired by the powers that be possible. Originally there are basically two main reasons, one of a strictly political and economic dynamics in the true sense of the processes and methods of conducting the management of the polis. Reasons and causes that corrupt for far too long and gradually erode the quality of social relations and the existence of each of us.
With regard to the economic momentum we have now reached a stage of global development of capitalism characterized by a shift of the centrality of the dominant system, as a productive and financially moment. Today, those who decide on the investment choices and economic policy are not the owners, but the ones who manage the finances. Private property, an old nemesis of the origins of socialism, for some time is no longer the economic foundation from which we must emancipate.
It is no longer possible to identify the liberation struggle for emancipation in the priority of the clash between the structures of capitalism and the whole own of the exploited. No longer makes sense the illusion of fighting an enemy / structure that is imposed by the arrogance of mastery of a hegemonic class. Today, the real enemy is plural and not necessarily structured in the class. We have a set of trends, speculative refined dexterity and ability to influence, accompanied by an enormous ability to float above and beyond the state bureaucracies.
This situation has led to the exasperation of the current economic authoritarianism already devastating the negative aspects of economic and social inequality, making it more extreme the fundamental differences between those who can and who can not, between those with and those without. The rich are getting richer and continue to accumulate capital and wealth that in several cases reach hyperbolic quantities, whereas poor are getting poorer and increases the amount of social stratum of poverty and neglect.
Furthermore, the subordination work increasingly looks like an endemic insecurity, making it even more weak and frail the last and those who are already weak. We have established that the requirement of allegiance is most engendered by diverse economic oligarchies, largely anonymous, impossible to pin down into categories unreal classist if not through verbal acrobatics abstract, which can only collide with the dynamics of movement and management that are oppressing us. The reality is fluid and unstructured, to learn to deal with taking into account its complexity, not rigid or stable, which primarily has a great capacity for adaptation and transformation.
In Italy everything is amplified and triggers a particularly serious spill on the whole population. The stifling of political patronage lobbies in power has made it a high level of endemic corruption and inefficient management of the ruling classes, such that the debt is high and the economy fails to keep pace with the pressures of globalization.

The control mechanisms

With regard to the fundamental political lives in a kind of original sin: the failure of democracy. The entry in the modern West has created and shaped in representative democracy, viewed as self-realization of the highest point of the instances of liberal freedom. Perhaps the founding fathers of liberal democracy have underestimated the possible effects of the authoritarian impulses and drives to the domain in the dominant culture and popular tendencies. One step after another, in defining rules and application procedures, they were definitely first mystified and then misled the spirit of representation and the deep meaning of democracy.
The institution of representation from the time the representative has become a mere instrument of delegation of powers. It all depends on what is meant, as in political representation has changed over time with multiple meanings. Since there is representation of fact when someone chooses and acts on behalf of others, should go beyond this forest polysemic to trace the original spirit for which it was conceived and to understand its deeper meaning. In the Middle Ages when people began to ask the question, not by chance that the representative director was conceived as a mere executor of the instructions given by the representatives. The representation was created as a political mechanism dictated by the need to trust the general will have performers.
Recognizing this original spirit of liberal democracy conceived as a technical representative democracy that the intent was to achieve this goal by linking it to the basic motives of his political philosophy, to control and limit power. Conceived since the establishment of special political mechanisms for the realization of a controlling relationship between governors and governed. But this vision could not fit the hegemonic tensions and pushed to the cultural domain present in overwhelmingly popular political imagination. The strong forces of economic interests of capitalist accumulation and the consequent boost to capitalize in order to accumulate substantial financial returns completed the picture of annihilation of the reasons why the representation was born.
The control mechanisms to meet the general will and individual instances are not compatible with the needs of concentration of power and wealth in few hands. The oligarchic pressures have pushed the absolutely right decision to the participation of direct democracy. Thus the institution of representation, from political moment of execution of orders and decisions taken collectively, gradually became the time of identification of the command from above. Today you do not vote to give a mandate, such as binding, that the delegates have to run, but to give legitimacy to those who have the power to decide at their discretion without having to account for their choices to delegating. Expression of democracy by the people, as had been planned and designed, it turned to the territory of the political leaders who act in its sole discretion legitimized by the consent election. All this has to do very little with the original spirit that has started the democratic form. The so-called democratic structures of today actually have nothing to do with the fundamental sense of democracy..

The immobility abyss

After the French Revolution, which gave great strength to the social tension toward equality, freedom and brotherhood, fundamental principles on which should underlie a society liberated from subservience and servility in the works for the management policy, it can be increasingly removed from the conditions foundational to re-emerge, in updated forms, and masquerades that the revolution had tried to suppress: the absolute concentration of power in few hands. What has not returned is the right of aristocratic wealth, permanently deleted. But the concentration of government and command in a few hands inside is fully recovered, in new ways and in many ways more efficient than before for the privileged. Accompanied by a concentration of wealth in few hands, this logic and this tension has led almost naturally to the situation we are experiencing.
In Italy the aggravating circumstance of a maximum concentration of political patronage, lobbying, corruption and managerial inefficiency consolidated in nearly half a century of political Christian Democrat hegemony, supported by Craxi's policy and bad catholic / communist cultural/ political, opened the way to an exaggerated form of populist Caesarism totally centered on the exaltation of the fawning and apologetic on the praise of the leaders, incensed by his minions to turn up to accept the truth of the facts in his favor. A situation which led to the brink of a stagnation we are experiencing.
Groped to get out of this impasse, which seems to be structural, we must start thinking of rebuilding from the bottom of the social relations of solidarity, the production of goods for all, an economy no longer functional in enrichment of the privileged. Acting within the ganglia of the system to reform it has always been groped for bankruptcy, because the mechanisms of absorption and retention of power is a very strong force.
We should ask instead of ideas in order to reconstruct the very low, just to avoid being more miserable and more "down".

Andrea Papi

translation Enrico Massetti: enricomassetti@msn.com