The form is swallowing the content.
Capital as a form is no more able to hold together the entropic force of global society, but so far the agony of capitalism is not coinciding with the emergence of autonomous forms of society. Biopolitical innervations of capital in the collective mind and the body are producing in fact a spasm paralyzing the process of subjectivation.
The black hole of financial abstraction is swallowing and destroying the product of two centuries of development and civilization, and is aggressing its content: the productive potency of the general intellect. The social civilization, created during the Modern age is invested and corroded by the metastases of the financial cancer.
How can the content get free from the form? This is the question that we should answer, while, as you can see, the building of civilization is crumbling.
The first act of the European tragedy
In 2012 the first act of the European tragedy has closed: the constituzionalization of the Fiscal Compact in eleven countries of the Eurozone is the final cancelation of the last remnants of democracy. The process of impoverishment of European society is steadily underway, and the dismantlement of the educational system creates the condition of spreading ignorance and barbarianism. Civil structures are falling apart. In Greece those who have no more a job lose the right to healthcare. People are dying for maladies that could be healed before the Euro did spread as a plague.
Precarious work and recomposition: the main problem
Traditional forms of movement’s action have exposed their inefficacity so the revolt has weakened after the wave of 2010-2011. Depression has taken the place of action. Precarious generation seems to bend to the prospect of a cultural and economic impoverishment, and seems unable to get rid of the cultural expectations that make people dependant on the media and finance. Precarious work seems unable to build a common ground of action on the European scale. So late has the movement grasped the European character of the capitalist restructuration, that resistance has only happened at the national level. The isolation of Greek people who during the last years have been fighting desperately in the absence of any widespread solidarity is the bitter sign of this delay.
The second act of the tragedy: from bankanization to balkanization.
In Spain, where the movement has been more persistent than elsewhere, the Catalan independentism is now reproposing the dynamics of European desolidarization. One million people have marched in September under the flags of independent Catalonia, and in October a nationalist crowd has filled the streets. This is opening the second act of the European tragedy, and is redesigning the context. The new dangerous phase steps from the submission of European society to the interests of the bank system (bankanization) to the multiplication of nationalist and ethnic conflicts leading to civil war on a continental scale: balkanization.
Civil war will have different forms: in Greece a wide part of the police and the army are linked to the Nazis party, and anti-European nationalism will trigger the rightwing answer against the growth of Syriza. In Spain independentism and nationalism will clash. What will happen in Hungary and Romania we can imagine, and also what will happen in Belgium, while the anti German hatred is growing everywhere. In Athens groups of young people have burned German flags with a swastika.
In Italy mafia war and new Northern secessionism are nourished by growing unemployment. And Berlusconi, far from defeated, can play his most devilish game, provoking the breakdown of the Italian market credibility, and disrupting the frail balance upon which the Euro is teetering.
Competition and loneliness
The front of labor is broken in Europe, and the division between North and South is concerning also the Unions, unable to express e common stance, and subjugated by national identity made of Southern resentment and Northern deception.
The process of privatization of social resources and the dismantlement of the rights of labor are underway, and what counts more is the effect that the finazist aggression is producing on subjectivity. Precarization has atomized work, transforming labor into de-personalized fragments of time, isolated in their loneliness. Now the finazist attack is transforming this depressed fragmentation into rabid aggressiveness leaning toward identitarian or suicidal forms.
Recomposition solidarity active withdrawal
The movement that expressed itself in 2010-11 without coordination on the national basis has been unable to stop the financial offensive, because the pacific protest has no effect on the monetarist dogma. Democracy has been cancelled by financial organizations that do not answer to the Parliament. The social movement cannot stop the offensive because financial abstraction is out of the reach of political action. Strikes and demonstrations, even armed resistance cannot have an effect upon dynamics that are totally disembodied. Only the organized force of society in the form of withdrawal can defuse the financial attack. The only possibility of survival for social life is mass insolvency and the creation of communitarian forms of exchange. Community currencies are proliferating, and will spread when social disaster will become deeper. But in order such a process to become strong and steady, solidarity is needed up to a level that European society is possessing no more.
We should not deny mental suffering, on the contrary we should start from it
If we want to restart a process of autonomous subjectivation we should start from psychic suffering. Only starting from the reconstitution of the psychic and social force of desire a process of mass insolvency can start, and a process of institutionalization of the sphere of the commons can follow. If we don’t develop this process of social recomposition and reactivation of solidarity, the issue of the constitutionalization of common wealth will be based on denial and will result into a rhetorical exercise.
How to heal asthma
When I had my first respiratory crises I understood that asthma has features similar to panic. The alveolus contracts and the lungs do not receive oxygen enough, so you start desperately to draw air but this is emphasizing your sense of asphyxiation, because hyper-ventilation triggers anxiety. Then my sister told me: ”relaxe, you should understand that you don’t need so much oxygen. Just a little bit of breathing will be enough.” Since then I had no more respiratory crises.
General reduction of work time
A new frame of interpretation of the process of social recomposition must be based on the reinvention of the anthropological and existential horizon, for the orientation of social movement in the next years of misery and violence.
In the XXth Century the process of subjectivation was based on a prospect of economic expansion, and social desire was modeled on expectations of acquisition property and ever increasing consumption.
Today while reducing demand and destroying productive forces, the monetarist dogma is promising growth, but growth will not come. Economic expansion is over, and Un-growth is not a moral or political choice that we can accept or refuse.
In Europe Un-growth is a given, a consequence of the redistribution of the world division of labor, of the exhaustion of the physical resources, and of the strategic defeat of the workers movement.
We must emancipate life-time from work, and redistribute the time of necessary work. Less work hours means also less unemployment.
The reduction of work time is the only strategy that makes possible to transform Un-growth into a process of enrichment of the quality of life and of collective pleasure.
In the process of de-evolution, social autonomy presupposes a redefinition of cultural expectations: the relation between work and consumption and the very concept of richness have to be rethought, and cultural expectations have to get rid of the identification of richness and acquisition.
We must emancipate social desire from that expectation: not possess but sharing, not competition but solidarity, not having but enjoying.
