Newsgroup: it.politica.ulivo
Titolo: The United States of Italy

Taken from the World Socialist Web Site of the International Committee
of the Fourth International at:  
http://www.wsws.org
The United States of Italy
By Emanuele Saccarelli
9 August 1999
The following comment was submitted to the WSWS by a reader living in
Rome.
Returning to Rome this summer after two years of absence, I noted some
glaring signs of change: a blossoming of McDonalds restaurants, the
unprecedented appearance of 24-hour drugstores, malls on the outskirts
of the city—smaller-scale replicas of the gigantic American sanctuaries
of
consumerism—the stronger presence of national and even foreign chains
such as, to name one, Blockbuster Video.
How can these signs be interpreted? They are obviously and
fundamentally economic changes. Big, global capital begins to penetrate
the smaller crevices of the Italian economy, in the retail sector, but
even
in the small but formerly impregnable fortress of Italian culinary
tastes,
which seems threatened by the giants of the food industry with their
badly
fried, pre-cooked, microwavable commodities. These changes herald the
demise of the “nation of shopkeepers”—that vibrant omnipresence of
small, family-owned shops noted by many of Italy's famous visitors.
Americana, with fries
These are, of course, also cultural changes. McDonalds may well
constitute culinary decay, but its most crucial and interesting aspect
is its
role as the harbinger of new rhythms, a new way of life. A country where
many shops close in the afternoon for about two hours, where more than
in perhaps any other nation meals are a crucial social and familial
event,
where life strikes one as proceeding at a markedly comfortable, human
pace, is now increasingly subject to powerful economic pressures.
The political economy of “flexibility”, in the name of competitiveness,
accelerates the mobility of labour, concentrates its employment, widens
its deployment across new shifts and working hours and generally
discards the established ways of operating in the service sector.
Capital,
increasingly freeing itself from the economic fetters of small family
ownership and from the legal restrictions of strict labour regulation,
institutes what amounts to a collective economic and cultural speed-up
for workers and consumers alike.
There lies the importance of McDonalds. Its workers employed outside
of the old and crumbling legal labour framework are often employed
part-time—and hence forced to supplement their income in other
ways—and deployed in shifts that cover day and night. Its consumers,
increasingly engaged in work that demands more of their time, come to
get their food, fast.
Rome strains its age-old traits to present a new, distorted face: a
caricature of an American city. Its citizens are more agitated. They are
sent spinning from economic forces into a more hectic pace of labour,
and from cultural pressures into the acceptance of a frenzied, and, most
importantly, American way of life. The forces unleashed by
globalization,
to the extent that the United States clings to its faltering world
hegemony,
come to invest Italy draped in Stars and Stripes.
Parallel political processes
Are these developments accompanied by transformations in the political
and institutional sphere? Fausto Bertinotti, the leader of the Stalinist
Rifondazione Comunista Party, believes this to be the case. He speaks
often in horror of the “Americanization” of Italian politics.
We should keep in mind that it was Antonio Gramsci—one of the
founders of the Italian Communist Party and an intellectual figure of
international magnitude—who warned, with reason, that there is nothing
more stupid and sterile than blind anti-Americanism on the part of a
European. From the standpoint of the working class, the decisive
character of the political aspect of “Americanization” is not the
mindless
parroting of the American model—though the sudden appearance of a
donkey symbol among the ranks of the centre-left and of an elephant in
the centre-right induces disbelieving stupor—but the relentless
expulsion
of the class question from the political sphere.
This offensive is being conducted along three main prongs: the reduction
of politics to management and administration, the decline of mass
parties
in favour of personality contests, the narrowing of the institutional
representation of a broad spectrum of political forces into two centrist
forces. We may quickly sketch each of these in the Italian context.
Economic questions become a mere technical matter that lies outside the
reach of democratic and political control. The brief appearance of an
allegedly non-political “technical government”—one composed of
bankers and administrators—in the early 1990s in Italy signalled
precisely such a turn. The mythological figure of the impartial
technocrat
survived intact this unfortunate political parenthesis. Its incarnations
now
still fill the ranks of the current administration, are sent to the
highest
spheres of European Union in the person of the “apolitical” economist
Mario Monti, and even claim the prestigious seat of President of the
Republic, with Carlo Azeglio Ciampi.
Along with this technocratic turn, the presence of regional and global
imperatives imposed by the European Union and the IMF have shrunk
the sphere of what can be the legitimate subject of political
decision-making and action. The question of the control of the means of
production, for instance, is now closed. It is closed first of all by
and for
those “leftists” who used to, at least occasionally, pay lip service to
it.
The current leader of the leftist governmental coalition Massimo
D'Alema, in his book Un Paese Normale, while proudly flaunting his
recently acquired non-communist credentials, reassures the reader that
if
anyone in his party were to even talk of nationalisation, such a person
would be immediately taken away to a mental institution. Even the most
timid forms of reformism are now rejected and overturned.
The elimination of the mass party as the prominent political form also
undercuts the cultural and structural grounds upon which broad,
class-based political movements can develop. The rise of
personality-based politics, of which media-magnate Berlusconi
represents both the forerunner and most prominent example, at best
impoverishes the quality of political discourse by injecting it with
shallow,
almost commercial subjectivism.
One-person parties such as the Patto Segni, Lista Dini and Bonino are
now proliferating. At its worst, this tendency could set the stage for
an
even more insidious sort of strongman populism that could hijack
class-based perspectives along nationalist and racist lines. The
existence
and behaviour of the quasi-separatist Northern League and fringe
formations on the extreme right may already announce dangerous
developments.
The elimination of proportional representation and the resulting
“bi-polarism” also aims at the normalisation of politics. The effects of
the
domestication of politics, its enclosure within a narrow fence, are most
evident in the American context. The Democratic and Republican parties,
though by no means politically equivalent, provide little real choice.
The Donkey's and the Elephant's ass sit on a political space that is at
once minute and large. It is large to the extent that the structural
features
of the American party system tend to exclude the representation of any
political position that veers away from the centre. It is minute to the
extent that the two existing parties stand in tacit agreement on a great
number of fundamental and broad political questions which are left out
of
the proper boundaries of the “political”.
These questions, of course, are precisely those that an independent
working class movement could raise. While this process is well under
way in Italy, it is still at best an incomplete one. The days of simple
proportional representation are gone. Yet the latest referendum on the
question, one that asked for the elimination of the residual
proportional
element in Italy's complex electoral law, was defeated in early June.
Signatures will be gathered for a new referendum of the same kind in
late
July. This event has been officially dubbed by the Radical Party which
is
organising its “Referendum Days”, in American.
Readers: The WSWS invites your comments. Please send e-mail:
edi...@wsws.org

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