In the early autumn of 2010, Sergio Marchionne declared that he lives in the AD era and cannot be dealing with listening to people who come from the time Before Christ. This blasphemous metaphor means that from the moment globalisation came into existence it has become impossible to defend the social rights that predated it.
If we are to compete with emerging economies where labour costs are lower than the cost of European workers, we must lower European wages. To compete with economies where the working day never ends and labour conditions are wild - low safety, massacring shifts and precariousness - we must abolish the limits to the working week, make overtime obligatory, and renounce safety at work in Europe too.
Sergio Marchionne’s thinking - which, after all, is an expression of the EU official line since the turn that followed the crisis in Greece last spring - can be translated in brutal terms: the evolution of capitalism requires the actual abrogation of the principles that derive from Socialism, the Enlightenment tradition, and Humanism, and democracy, if this word still means anything. A last observation: playing with the Christological metaphor, in the aftermath of Christ even the Christian principle of love for your neighbour has been abolished or, at best, reduced to Sunday sermons.
Is this the Europe we want? Is this the image of itself that Europe has decided to bow to? Does Marchionne’s thinking coincide with EU policy? Obviously rather than principles we are dealing with power relations. In the last few years the financial class, a now dominant group of the economic world government, has used globalising technical powers to enormously augment the wealth ratio that ends up in the pockets of a minority in the form of profit and financial rent. The working class and pluri-morphous cognitive labour could not resist the attack that followed globalisation.
This wealth distribution is in conflict with the very possibility of a further development of capitalism because the reduction of the global wage causes a decrease in global demand. The results are an impoverishment that makes society more fragile and aggressive, but also a deflation that makes it impossible to re-launch growth.
How do we get out of it?
Mr Marchionne and his friends’, people of the AD era, think the following: if deregulation produced the systemic collapse that the global economy is now confronted with, we need more deregulation. If lower taxation on high incomes led to a fall in demand, let’s lower high income taxation. If hyper-exploitation resulted in the overproduction of unsold and useless cars, let’s intensify car production.
Are these people crazy? I don’t think so. I think they are incapable of thinking in terms of the future, panicking, and terrorised by their own impotence: they are scared. All they are capable of is increasing their wages and the dividends of their fellow diners.
The modern bourgeoisie was a strongly territorialised class, linked to material assets; it could not do without a relationship with the territory and community. The financial class that dominates the contemporary scene has no relation of attachment either to the territory or to material production because its power and wealth are founded on the perfect abstraction of a digitally multiplied finance. This digital-financial hyper abstraction is liquidating the living body of the planet and the social body.
Can it last? The European directorate that emerged after the Greek crisis established, in the absence of any consultation of public opinion, its own monopoly over decision powers on the economies of different countries from 2011, effectively divesting parliaments of authority and substituting the Union democracy with a business executive headed by the large banks. Can the Merkel-Sarkozy-Trichet directorate impose a system of automatisms that secures EU members compliance with the process of public sector wage reduction, lay-offs of a third of all teachers, and so on and so forth?
On October 16th there were two major demonstrations in Rome and Paris; these raise doubts as to whether the financial dictatorship will manage to achieve some stability. Sarkozy might succeed in pushing through the law that lengthens working life to 65 years, and in Italy the policies of reduction of workers’ wages and rights will not cease with the coming fall of the Berlusconi government. This is for sure.
But in the Latin (Catholic) countries of Europe this European dictatorship will not be established because in the coming months there will be a persistent outburst, however contradictory and violent at times, of social insubordination that will identify the real enemy in the Union, its granite directorate and seemingly neutral governance techniques. Then, the current Europe will need to be abolished so that the possible Europe can emerge.
At that stage we will have to ask ourselves: is it true that we must compete following economic rules? The term is wrong but if we must speak of competition at all costs why not compete at the level of lifestyles, modes of public spirit, happiness and enjoyment indicators, and the relaxation of the collective sensuous organism? Haven’t these criteria had a greater role in the long term of human evolution than the amount of oil burned, the number of nuclear power stations or the GDP? Unless they are seized by avarice - a psychotic obsession - all that human beings want is a pleasant, quite, possibly long life, consuming what is necessary to keep fit and make love. ‘Civilisation’ is the pompous name we have given to all the political or moral values that made the pursuit of this life style possible.
Now Marchionne comes to tell us that if we want to keep playing the game played in banks and stock markets, we must give up a pleasant, quiet life. We must give up civilisation. But why should we accept this exchange? Europe’s wealth is not the stability of the Euro on international markets, or the managers’ ability to keep count of their profits. Europe is wealthy because it has millions of intellectuals, scientists, technicians, doctors and poets, and millions of workers who, for centuries, have augmented their technical knowledge. Europe is wealthy because it historically managed to valorise competence, not just competition, and to welcome and integrate cultures from afar. It is also wealthy because, it must be said, for four centuries it has ferociously exploited the physical and human resources of other continents.
We must give something up, but what exactly? Certainly we must give up the hyper-consumption imposed on us by large corporations, but not the tradition of Humanism, Enlightenment and Socialism, not freedom, rights, and welfare. And this is not because we are attached to past principles, but because they make it possible to live decently. The prospect open to us is not a revolution. The concept of revolution no longer corresponds to anything, because it entails an exaggerated notion of the political will over the complexity of contemporary society. Our prospect is a paradigmatic shift: to a new paradigm that is not centred on product growth, profit and accumulation, but on the full unfolding of the power of collective intelligence. This is what Europe could give the world.
I don’t think that Europe has something to teach to other civilisations on the planet. It can offer an original contribution, as it has often done in the past, with mixed results. We imposed the capitalist model and now look for a way out of it. We cannot get out of capitalism, as other economic models (slavery, feudalism etc.), capitalism is indelible; but we must get out of its unchallengeable domination. The autonomy of society from the domination of capital, the unfolding of the powers that capital has realised in its conflictual coexistence with labour. This is the original contribution that the European Union, the possible one, the one of the After-Anno-Domini that Marchionne cannot even imagine, could offer to world history.
