through europe

On February 24^th and 25^th all Italian citizens above the age of 18 were called to vote for the new Parliament. After almost 20 years of declining stagnation under Berlusconi’s rule, and after the brief but devastating experience of ‘austerity politics’ as enforced by Monti, everybody expected the Italian Left to conquer absolute majority in both chambers of the Parliament. Electoral results came as a shock to most: Berlusconi caught up with the Left-wing coalition, gathering almost 30% of the votes, Monti’s party stopped at 10%, while Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S), an as-yet-unseen populist movement led by former TV comedian Beppe Grillo, conquered an unexpected 25% of preferences and became the single most voted party in a hung Parliament.

 

Although there are several interesting aspects to this situation – not least the Left’s astonishing inability to win even under the most favourable conditions, or Berlusconi’s equally astonishing ability to survive against all odds – I would like to focus on Beppe Grillo’s M5S, which constitutes an interesting and dangerous novelty in the Italian and European scenarios.

 

L’unione europea nacque come progetto di pace e di solidarietà sociale raccogliendo l’eredità della cultura socialista e internazionalista che si oppose al fascismo.

Negli anni ’90 le grandi centrali del capitalismo finanziario hanno deciso di distruggere il modello europeo, e dalla firma del Trattato di Maastricht in poi hanno scatenato un’aggressione neoliberista. Negli ultimi tre anni l’anti-Europa della BCE e della Deutsche Bank ha preso l’occasione della crisi finanziaria americana del 2008 per trasformare la diversità culturale interna al continente europeo (le culture protestanti gotiche e comunitarie, le culture cattoliche barocche e individualiste, le culture ortodosse spiritualiste e iconoclaste) in un fattore di disgregazione politica dell’unione europea, e soprattutto per piegare la resistenza del lavoro alla definitiva sottomissione al globalismo capitalista. Riduzione drastica del salario, eliminazione del limite delle otto ore di lavoro quotidiano, precarizzazione del lavoro giovanile e rinvio della pensione per gli anziani, privatizzazione dei servizi. La popolazione europea deve pagare il debito accumulato dal sistema finanziario perché il debito funziona come un’arma puntata alla tempia dei lavoratori.

Cosa accadrà? Due cose possono accadere: o il movimento del lavoro riesce a fermare questa offensiva e riesce a mettere in moto un processo di ricostruzione sociale dell’Unione europea, o il prossimo decennio vedrà in  molti luoghi d’Europa esplodere la guerra civile, il fascismo crescerà dovunque, e il lavoro sarà sottomesso a condizioni di sfruttamento ottocentesco.

Ma come fermare l’offensiva?

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.

 

Austeridad en Europa

Los fanáticos del fundamentalismo económico dicen que “el trabajador alemán no quiere pagar las facturas del pescador griego” y, mientras tanto, enfrentan a los trabajadores entre sí, llevando a Europa al borde de la guerra civil.

La entidad que es "Europa" fue concebida a raíz de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, como un proyecto para superar el nacionalismo moderno y crear una unión no identitaria basada en los principios del humanismo, la ilustración y la justicia social. ¿Qué queda de este proyecto original, después del reciente colapso financiero que ha asaltado la economía estadounidense y ha puesto en peligro a la zona euro? Desde el comienzo de la Unión Europea, el perfil constitucional de la entidad europea ha sido débilmente definido, de manera que el objetivo económico de prosperidad y las limitaciones del monetarismo financiero han tomado el lugar de una constitución. En la década de 1990, el Tratado de Maastricht marcó un punto de inflexión en este proceso. Sancionó la constitucionalización de la regla monetarista y sus implicaciones económicas: una disminución del gasto social, reducción de los costes laborales y un aumento de la competencia y la productividad. Los efectos de una aplicación intolerante de las reglas de Maastricht se hicieron evidentes en 2010: aplastando a Grecia e Irlanda y poniendo en peligro otros países, la crisis financiera mostró las contradicciones entre los deseos de crecimiento económico y estabilidad social, y la rigidez monetarista. En esta situación, las reglas de Maastricht han demostrado ser peligrosas, y la concepción global de la UE, basado en el protagonismo de la competencia económica, ha revelado su fragilidad.

 

This piece derives in part from an article I wrote in October 2011, titled Recurring Dreams: the red heart of fascism. In that article, I tried to analyze two different types of debt (the money-debt and the life-debt) in the light of the history of Western capitalism and of the current financial crisis. Also, I drew a number of comparisons between the current European/American situation and the one experienced during the inter-war period by those countries defeated in WWI. I attempted to warn of a recurrence of the breeding times of fascism/nazism, in which people’s exasperation for the devastating effects of a debt crisis risks turning into the desire for a higher authority to take absolute control and impose a new order. Finally, I warned of the ‘red’ – that is, left-wing, social – core of the early 20th century versions of fascism and nazism, and I identified similar desires in vast strata of today’s left.

 

Since I wrote that text, however, things have changed. With the rise of unelected, technocratic governments in Italy and Greece, with the deepening of the crisis and the enforcement of even more austerity measures, with the waves of occupations and repression in countless countries, and, most notably, with the umpteenth split in the left, the set of dangers and opportunities, I believe, has changed. To the risk of fascism, still present in the hearts of many, especially on the populist fringes, I would like to add that of authoritarian social capitalism. To the opportunity of revolutionary politics, I would like to add that of prefigurative-politics and of anarchist reformism.