through europe

At the end of the 1970s, Italy was going through a traumatic yet extremely creative phase of its history. Those were the heydays of the Autonomia movement: radical extra-parliamentary groups (composed by students, unionists, workers, unemployed) were fiercely confronting the austerity politics imposed by the bigot, mafia ridden Christian-Democrats (DC) with the complicity of the Communist Party (PCI). While society was increasingly subjected to militarization, corruption was rampant; the decaying political establishment was more arrogant than ever. The party founded by Antonio Gramsci was seen as a Stalinist oppressor by the movement, the big unions as its partners in crime. Not a single day passed without a major demonstration or a few Molotov bombs thrown at the police.

Like many other viral videos on Youtube, this liberating, mildly choreographic effort to say “goodbye” to a despotic boss made me release more depressant toxins that it apparently did to other million viewers.

The story behind it is now a popular fabula: Marina Shifrin, 25, was employed by “an awesome company” (her words) that produces animation videos. “For almost two years”, she explains, “I’ve sacrificed my relationships, time and energy for this job”.

It’s 4.30am and she’s still at work. It doesn’t seem to be an exception.

She positions her camera in strategic spots, looking straight into it with her thick glasses, then she unexpectedly starts to dance around the office, lonely yet glowing. “I quit”, is the caption flashing multiple times under her moves.

The potential list of objectionable adjectives that have been extended to the medley of policies collectively understood as ‘workfare’ is, much like any credibility once invested in the present coalition government, indubitably nearing the point of expiry. Indeed workfare, and its present puppeteer the Home Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, are now not not only regarded as mad, bad and malicious but alsothoroughly inept. Surely even ‘IDS’ thought the numbers, the returns on government ‘investment’ in awarding these deals to A4E and others would not be so precociously dreadful as to place the programs beyond the parameters of any credible defence?

 

The contribution of groups such asBoycott Workfare,DPAC and Solfed, among others, in discrediting workfare programmes is impressive. At the same time such a contribution has undoubtedly been embedded within a defensive approach that has come to characterize anti-austerity struggles throughout the OECD. At times, as with workfare, such a response can be impressive. The student movement of 2010 was similarly a defensive struggle but was nonetheless possessed of admirable flexibility, scale and intensity. The same is true, indeed to a greater extent, with the ultimately victorious Quebecois student movement of the last two years, impressively coordinated byClasse. Conversely the UK ‘pensions fightback’ by public sector unions in 2011, again essentially defensive, shared few if any of these qualities. This is for a variety of reasons and has nothing to do with the intelligence or integrity of those involved, nor the quantity or quality of legitimate grievances they possessed. Indeed for all its scale, tenacity and openness the UK student movement of 2010 likewise failed to achieve its objectives or indeed really catalyse a larger movement beyond itself - although in retrospect it undoubtedly undermined any credible argument the coalition could communicate about its ambition to ‘share’ the burden of austerity.

 

 

 

Promises

 

Why do people work? If they are not insane, they do it for the money. And what do they need this money for? To buy freedom from work. At the same time, money seems to be necessary to escape from the money-obsession of the poor, just like work seems to be necessary to escape from the work-obsession of the unemployed. The apparent non sequitur of these connections is the description of the logical loop in which most humans live and function in today’s society. Strangely enough, the very origin of their endless tail-chasing seems to be their desire to achieve a state of freedom, that is, an escape form the loop itself.

 

How could the human desire for freedom turn into a self-perpetuating and enslaving mechanism? Within the contemporary landscape, the answer lies in the way capitalism, as it always does, manages to take our requests to the letter, and to return them to us realized, if slightly modified. That slight modification, as we all know, is the tiny poison pill that turns all our ‘realized’ demands into even stricter chains. This is how, over the years, capitalism realized the requests for flexible work, sexual liberation, democracy, and so on. Capitalism always gives us what we want, but it does so in such a way that brings to reality the darkest warnings of the old saying, ‘be careful what you wish for’.