|
 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
|
rivista
anarchica
anno
41 n. 366
