On February 24th and 25th 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.
M5S was born on the net less than three years ago, and begun as an informal movement mostly concerned with issues regarding ecology and freedom of the internet, resembling a mix of northern-European green and pirate movements. It soon grew in strength and cohesion, spreading mostly in the Italian province and among the younger generations. It also became the main point of identification for the class of small (or tiny) entrepreneurs devastated by the crisis, as well as for a number of disaffected left-wingers, radical antagonists of the No-Tav movement, and neofascists alike.
Despite his role as unchallenged leader of the Movement, Beppe Grillo decided not to candidate himself to the Parliament. He acted as a sort of Mourinho of the movement, the coach who takes all the pressure of the media upon himself, while letting his footballers play. As with the Special One, his players were supposed to respond only to him.
This, I believe, is one of the most interesting elements about the movement. All members of M5S share and are characterized by one thing: they are all indignant, and they are all innocent. Nobody (apart from Beppe Grillo) can judge them, because anybody external to the movement is responsible for the crisis of the Italian, European and global economy and society. In particular, they believe the ‘caste’ – an umbrella term to define anybody who enjoys institutional privileges, from PA employees to professional politicians, from journalists to investment bankers – to be responsible for the general corruption that plagues Italy, and such corruption to be the cause of all Italian evils. Although my explanation might sound like a simplification of the positions of M5S, it is in fact a faithful reproduction of its amazingly over-simplified rhetoric.
This theme of the apriori innocence of the members of the movement assumes a more universal tone if we consider how the movement itself claims to represents a clear expression of the Italian People, understood almost as a mystical body: M5S is the expression of the whole of the Italian People, as opposed to the small clique of the ‘caste’. Those sections of the Italian electorate who are not (yet) part of the movement are not considered to be enemies, but simply ‘lost sheep’, to whom the movement addresses one of its favourite war-cries, ‘Sveglia!!!’ (‘Wake-up!!!’).
This kind of rhetoric finds its most contemporary predecessor in the Occupy movement, with its slogan of the 99% as opposed to the global clique of the 1%; or, in the 20th Century, in the Nazi discourse of the ‘healthy’ German Volk as opposed to the cosmopolitan clique of the Jewish conspiracy. But we can trace this opposition between the innocent People and the evil clique or ‘caste’ to more ancient examples, such as the Anabaptist movements that fired up the German countryside of the 16th century. Like them, the members of M5S believe in the unappealable judgment of their innocent souls, as exemplified by the child-judges of John of Leiden’s city of Munster in 1534. And like the armies led by Thomas Muntzer, they place unlimited hope in the gospel of their charismatic leader, while waging war against the evil ‘caste’ of the Princes with their arsenal made up of pitch-forks and axes. Their strategic shortcomings (political or military that they may be) are expected to dissolve in front of the innate goodness that lies in their hearts. In this, they also resemble the Ghost-Dance movement that led the surviving Sioux against the US Army at the end of the 19th Century, when thousands of suicidal Native Americans faced the rifles of the 7th Cavalry armed only with the belief in the magic of their dance and in the charisma of their leader Wovoka.
It would be simple to take apart both the discourse of the presumed innocence of the members of the movement (whom, it should not be forgotten, constituted the electoral body that kept Berlusconi and its xenophobic allies in power for decades) and its identification with the mystical body of the People. It would be simple, but I’d rather look in further depth into such a discourse both in political and psychological terms.
A good way of entry into the strategy and psychology of the movement is to consider two of their main slogans: ‘Vaffanculo!’ (‘Fuck off!’, also the name of the first mass gathering of the movement in 2007, the ‘V Day’, ‘Fuck-Off Day’) and ‘Tutti a Casa!’ (‘All must go!’, resembling the Argentinean slogan of 2001 ‘Que se vayan todos!’). Both are presumably uttered by the united, innocent body of the Italian People, as it addresses the evil clique of the institutional ‘caste’. Despite the immediate violence of their semiotics, neither of them actually proposes any kind of violent resolution of the injustice that, in the vision of the movement, riddles the Italian society. Both slogans are the expression of a desire for a cosmic cleansing, a divine justice that simply removes the obstacles to the kingdom of the innate goodness of the People, as if through a sudden opening of the Earth beneath the feet of the members of the evil ‘caste’. The sentiment that animates them – and that also resounds in the main slogan of Beppe Grillo’s electoral campaign, ‘Arrendetevi!’ (‘Surrender!’ referred of to the members of the ‘caste’ and to all other political parties) – is one of universal and millenarian reconciliation, as preceded by an equally universal and millenarian apocalypse of the existing order.
This millenarian dimension is, in my opinion, the most interesting and dangerous aspect of M5S, and the one that could potentially inspire similar experiences across Europe.
In the face of an economic crisis that is particularly virulent in the European context, European middle and lower classes find themselves as utterly disempowered. They have lost any belief in the emancipatory potential both of traditional left-wing parliamentary politics (seen as part of the problem, the ‘caste’, rather than of its solution) and of contemporary Occupy-style movements (which make a flag out of their own martyrdom at the hands of the police, while being unable to really influence institutional decision-making). Most of all, European middle and lower classes feel with certainty the acceleration of history beneath their feet, and their fast descent outside of the safe environment of what once used to be called the ‘first world’. Their reaction to this state of affairs, although surprising, is certainly in line with a strong current that flows through the contemporary world: instead of articulating their anxieties along traditional political lines, they are opting for a millenarian solution. They are telling the old world to ‘fuck-off’, to ‘go home’, to ‘surrender’. They refuse to acknowledge any legitimacy or any reality to it – it is emblematic how Beppe Grillo addresses other politicians simply as ‘the walking dead,’ that is, as devoid of the real life that presumably is prerogative of the members of M5S and of the People – and thus they refuse to engage with it in any realistically equal confrontation. In this sense, they could be considered as the (so-far) pacifist, European equivalent of the millenarian and religiously-inspired movements that animate great part of today’s Arab world .
Beyond such mystical aspects, however, the attitude of M5S reveals also a darker side, which I believe is also connected to the psychological repercussions of the recent historical shifts affecting Europe. As the crisis and the austerity measures that followed forced millions of European families and individuals towards or below the poverty line, the nations to which they belong also saw a rapid decline towards the limits of the so-called first world. As the individual bodies of the recent unemployed and newly dispossessed increasingly seek suicide as a liberating solution to their painful impasse, social bodies also begin to tend towards social suicide. In its refusal to engage meaningfully with the complex reality that surrounds it, in its millenarian over-simplifications and in its desire for a ‘final judgement’ enacted through the mystical body of the innocent People, Beppe Grillo’s movement reveals itself not only as the first millenarian mass-movement of 21st century Europe, but also as its first actively apocalyptic. Beppe Grillo’s ‘fuck off!’ is not a direction towards any future (not even an utopian future) , but rather a movement towards a time that exceeds time, towards the end of time of an apocalypse that will cleanse the world and will reveal the ‘Just’ and the ‘Unjust’.
This spirit – worthy of the Children’s Crusade of 1212 as well as of the darkest punk of the ‘no-future’ era – is what really constitutes the novelty of Beppe Grillo’s movement, and what, in my opinion, could spread like wildfire across Europe.
A few months ago, the Italian autonomist intellectual Franco Berardi Bifo – who also declared to vote for Beppe Grillo’s movement, in consideration of its ‘disaggregating’ potential – launched one of his talks with the question ‘What can be done, when nothing can be done?’. M5S, its leader and its members seem to finally provide an answer to this question: when the skies darken and the future grins malignly, only the Ghost Dance can save us all. Stomping at the sound of the flute played by the prophet Beppe Grillo, the innocent body of the Italian People will finally dance towards the only place where happiness and freedom can be granted. A space that exceeds this land ridded by conflicts and contradictions, a time that exceeds this slow time of corruption and of ‘castes’. The place where Tibetan Buddhist monks rest, once the fire has consumed the last inch of their burning flesh. The punk nirvana of social suicide.
