.
The English may be a little clumsy, but the video is great. Until the end you’d never guess what book they’re assembling.
Art Attack Italy: How to make a Book Bloc shield
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We are the Wu Ming Foundation. We are a collective of novelists based in Italy. We are the authors of several novels. As of Springtime 2013, four of them are available in English: Q, 54, Manituana and Altai.If you want to know more about us, check these links:
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One of the few, the very few bright spots in Italy right now. I can’t get my mind around the shambles that Benito Berlusconi has produced and why the unions, the political parties (are there any left wing parties ?) the intellectuals don’t actually do something.
@ Geoff,
there’s struggle all over the country: demonstrations, occupations, rioting and more legal tactics. The situation is bad, but there’s a part of Italy that keeps resisting. That part of Italy has no official representatives, because the establishment of the official Left is morally, strategically and neurologically bankrupt. Grassroots movements “do it themselves”, and sometimes they manage to win specific/local, but no less important, battles.
The trouble is that the foreign media almost exclusively (and obsessively) cover Berlusconi (his scandals, his gaffes, his bullshit), and rarely show the other aspects of Italian life. The international media coverage of Italy, even when “good-intentioned”, is rather folkloristic, tacky in exposing tackiness, and always patronizing, as if they were talking about the consequences of giving universal suffrage to a hopelessly stupid population :-(
O.K., point taken, but power is about being in charge of making policy decisions and there is no sign of any group/movement that can even come close to dislodging B. and his lackeys. Is there any chance of a non-violent revolution, similar to Leipzig ’89? Monday marches, sit-ins, hackers’ outtakes?
No, it doesn’t, you’re right about that. However, does anything like that exist in the rest of Europe? Does it exist in the UK, in Ireland, in Belgium, in Greece?
Let’s not look at Italy alone, we need to put what happens in Itay in the continental context. Berlusconi is not the source of all our problems, he’s a consequence of the system’s failures, as well as an “Arch-Italian”, peculiar version of the mixture of neo-liberalism and populism plaguing the whole continent.
Italy is an anomaly not because there are no resemblances between this country and the others, quite the opposite. In Italy all general, transnational phenomena and trends are taken to the extreme and find a new synthesis, which will be re-adapted on the general, transnational level. For example, in France many observers describe the Sarkozy years as the age of the “berlusconisation” of French politics, and several European xenophobic/populist movements have been looking to the Northern League for inspiration. If that happens, it’s because both Berlusconi and the Northern League managed to interpret a general trend in an effective way.
The whole of Europe is fucked up, not only Italy. The continental economy is collapsing, Portugal is likely to be the next country to fall, the crisis is striking hard, the EC doesn’t want to change the neo-liberal recipe and wants the national governments to manage the kitchen in the same neo-liberal way. Which means that the poor will keep paying for the crimes and misdemeanours of the rich. Berlusconi is simply doing with much less, er, grace and much more creepy clownishness (he reminds me of Pennywise, Stephen King’s evil clown) what all other European governments are doing. Getting rid of him will not be enough, because there will be a Berlusconism without Berlusconi, and also because the important things aren’t really decided in Rome anymore, they’re decided in Brussels.
What we all need (we need it badly) is a frame that includes all the conflicts and movements that are taking place in Europe.
Well, sounds like a revolution to me. Shall I quote Marx & Engels here? Perhaps not.It comes down to three basic problems that are, as you write, European-based.
1. The proessional politicians have no grasp of what is going on.
2. The bankers and their satraps make Billions by playing with exchange rates. There was a very good article in the LRB about the fixing of the rates – simply by taking advantage of millisecond differences a lot of money can be made. 1 & 2 together mean that the economy is (a) disconnested to any ‘real value’ of goods and services and in the hands of rogues.
3. There is no labour movement in Europe that could be the root of an international reform (or revolution) movement. I suspect all attempts to build up Berlusconi or Sarcosy into mighty dictators and fear that the neo-liberal system will spiral out of control within a year or so. 1929 again.
All that you’re saying is plausible and realistic. However, if we were more determined to lay emphasis on what actually exists instead of systematically laying it on what doesn’t, maybe it would be less difficult to recognise and acknowledge the positive contributions that many people are already giving. And when we acknowledge positive contributions, it becomes less difficult to find their common denominators (and multiples). And when we find the common denominators, it becomes less difficult to establish alliances. At the end of the day, what other path can we take?
To me Berlusconi is way ahead!
Don’t get me wrong, let me explain.
As you mentioned already, what happens in Italy happens also in other European countries.
But for instance here in Greece the “shadow government” of Businessmen stays in the “political background” and handles the media through sports (each one of them is, or tries to be, a president/manager of a football team!). But Berlusconi got rid of intermediaries and does the job himself. Why be ONLY a president of a football team when you can be the head of a political party? of a government? Who needs rogue intermediaries and puppets?
I think that we agree that the central weakness of the democratic system is that mistakes are always being made and that rascals like Berlusconi will check out the system and exploit the chinks to line his coffers. A lot of a state’s resources go into the processes of investigating the crimes and following the perpertrators. Things tend to get known, even if the damge has been done. My point about the Leipzig Marches was that the ruinous effects of a dictatorship were exposed by the very presence of the marhers on the street, wheras in Italy, the marchers go largely unnoticed, or, as in Ukraine are beaten up, thrown into jail and then insilted by that arrogant post-Stalinist ruffian, Lukashenko. What I hope for is an uprising on apeaceful basis in which we get to select and elect honest, competent leaders who work for us and not against us. Utopia? Of course, but what else is there?
So, now you’ve got him, if the article in today’s Guardian is true. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/14/berlusconi-investigated-teenage-prostitution-case
But I won’t hold my breath – he’ll probably eel out of it claiming, as his lackeys do, that it is part of a leftist propganda plot. Surely, now he must go and the Fini era begin?
Dunno what’s going to happen, but it seems, at least, that these notes of mine were correct! :-)
http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/wumingblog/?p=1448
[...] För att göra din egen boksköld, se denna video. [...]
hi, complimenti on level of intelligent debate, i would like to raise a couple of points with you:
1) the role of China in the crisis. Without invoking xenophobia or racism, isn’t it true that the current crisis, which has exacerbated many situations in Italy/Europe, is mainly due to China’s swelling economic clout? Any European sales, competitivity etc. are all undermined by the cheap labour of the world’s largest and worst-treated work force. Throughout Italy local shop-owners have seen their business prospects plummet due to the arrival of Chinese competition. These immigrants arrive with cash in hand – financed, perhaps, some say, by Chinese mafia, and set up low cost stores that eventually drive native Italians out of business. We all know this, but nobody speaks. Instead, the ‘crisis’ is explained in vague terms as due to the impersonal movements up and down of financial markets, spreads, etc. – stuff which no-one but economists can understand.
2) the ‘bankruptcy’ of the left. This is part of the same globalisation phenomenon. Once upon a time the union movement could oblige bosses to come to terms, to distribute resources in a fairer way, to acquire the fundamental rights that still distinguish Europe’s businesses when compared to their eastern competitors. Today the bosses have the ‘handle of the knife’ in their hands, as they can simply up sticks and outsource at the first whiff of union trouble. Even Fiat wanted to move to Serbia not so long ago. Thus, the left has been deprived of its motor, which has traditionally been its links via unionism to the muscle of the working masses…
best to you