From citizens to subjects: the nightmare of a subsidized society divided between hyper-guaranteed and forgotten
One of the most dramatic evidences marked by the progress of the pandemic crisis is the increasingly marked and ferocious gap between a socially guaranteed class and the remaining part of the population abandoned to the sea off the purely private effort to survive.
Public employees, pensioners and earners in various capacities and in varying degrees of income (citizenship, emergency) on the one hand and on the other hand entrepreneurs, VAT numbers, freelancers who instead struggle in the exhausted body of a now tormented sociality: a sort of doubling of the reality in which we have fallen, whereby the former can complain and suffer the limitations to freedom, movement, the narrowness of horizons without having to endure problems of economic sustenance, while on the shoulders of the latter in addition to all these problems , day by day more and more serious, the tragic impossibility of making ends meet and being able to bring bread home is also demolished.
This gap has always existed in Italy, so much so that many parties have aggregated around stakeholders and social classes rather than for their own particular vision of the world and society: some left-wing parties have emerged as attractors of classes. have always been hyper-guaranteed, and in the pandemic this phenomenon has become radicalized and has undergone a clear acceleration.
In some cases it also seems that the same choice of subjects (or better, of categories) to be vaccinated before others follows this same inverted logic, typically corporate and electoral: the guaranteed becomes more and more guaranteed, the poorly guaranteed withdraws on one condition of absolute minority, reduced to a subject devoid of political actoriality, of civic awareness, as he is forced to wander among the smoking rubble to be able to support himself.
In this tragedy there is the weight of a truly neo-feudal twist, with an assault on the productive classes reduced to silence and hunger, and with the 'kind' hand of the State that promises and announces support, refreshments, aid, all functional to consolidation of sovereign power: on the other hand, the hungry would hardly bite the hand of those who feed it.
In this sense, the proliferation of bonuses and subsidies is significantly causing the political conscience and thirst for freedom of many Italian citizens to retreat; if the problem becomes the empirically dramatic one of feeding your children, the limitations on freedom become almost ancillary, a secondary problem.
The absolutely uneducational phenomenology of these incomes, to which can be added the universal one recalled as an absolute necessity recently by Beppe Grillo, their anti-political and anti-competitive attitude has been repeatedly emphasized by attentive analysts.
In 2018, for the types of Arachne , the valuable volume “Robotized Democracies. US and EU: neofeudalism and citizenship income " , by Raul Jimenez Tellado and Fernández Luis Moreno: an exhaustive and accurate analysis of how high technology, narrowness of physical and cognitive horizons and subsidies alter the institutional landscape to generate a neofeudal society with few sovereign lords and a mass of subsidized subjects now forgetful of civil life and liberty.
This is a disturbing future scenario that political science and technology scholars have been outlining with increasing force in recent years: from the chilling "Automating inequality" by Virginia Eubanks to the very recent "The coming of Neo Feudalism" by Joel Kotkin, whose latest book it also encompasses how the pandemic crisis risks neofeudalizing globalization and its silicon womb.
It does not surprise me in this sense that especially from the parts of the 5 Star Movement since the beginning of the pandemic there has been talk of "opportunities", innervating the narrative with a series of measures and ideas that end up exactly in the no-man's land of this conjunction between subsidies and high technology: on the other hand, just go to Grillo's blog to check this roller coaster based on smart cities , futuristic projects, artificial intelligences, reduction of human work and consequent automation of production lines, subsidies and universal incomes .
Not dissimilar is the approach of the health minister Roberto Speranza who in his book hastily (but not enough) withdrawn from trade in Italy and not escaped, however, the warehouses of Amazon Spain and France, concludes his literary reconstruction by outlining new projects, a new ministry , the return of the wind of the left, in fact and here too the story of the pandemic as an opportunity. A complex and stunning scenario of social and institutional engineering that in the pandemic sees a factor of powerful acceleration of phenomena that are latently pre-existing to it.
The enormous problem with this vision of the world is that it forgets on the way, as if it were an obsolete and obsolete element, freedom in its many forms: individual freedom, of expression, and collective freedom, and the freedom of enterprise, of the market, of competition. It eradicates work, seen and conceived as a threat, and replaces it with the subsidy graciously granted by the sovereign: work as a threat, yes, because in work the very meaning of a vital and free community is built.
It is no coincidence that the always cited but poorly understood article 1 of the Constitution founds our social pact precisely on work. Work is not only the empirical and material one, and on the other hand Article 4 of the Constitutional Charter refers to that, there is also a high, almost metaphysical sense of work understood as the ability to question oneself, to cultivate awareness. criticism, to become an active part of society. Work is competition, effort, a horizon of freedom. The subsidy is the negation of all this, because the subsidy dilutes the complexity, the particular, homogenizes the differences and makes us all dependent on the concession, in the messianic waiting for the sovereign power to prove generous.
A democracy in theory should instead be based on pluralism, thirst for freedom, active life, participation and healthy competition, certainly not on gifts of any kind: the 'struggle' between bearers of distinct world views and different interests should be summarized by the parliamentary rationality and the selection of political and party ruling classes. But it seems clear, both of these factors have run aground: Parliament no longer proceduralizes anything, incapable, weak and self-deprecated in favor of other centers of interest and other powers.
As for the parties, exhausted, prey to endemic and shaking crises, wrapped in the shroud of anti-politics that brutally strikes any form of complexity, they are no longer able to select any form of ruling class. On the other hand, it is enough to go over the minutes of the parliamentary discussions to check what the average tone of the arguments is, not to mention the pending laws as eternal ghosts and whose proposals and editorial tone are very, very often, horror.
Given this framework, the gap between classes becomes a desertification of the electoral references of some political forces that have always looked to the freedom of enterprise, and the consolidation on the other side, i.e. on the left, of their electoral classes: a sort of construction of a vassal path, stratified and in which a given degree of possibility of participation in political decisions corresponds to each level.
On the ruins of a weakened and exhausted Italy, the definitive sunset of the obsolescent democracy of a parliamentary matrix is taking place. When in the early years of the twentieth century a giant of legal thought like Santi Romano saw the crisis of the state, first in the famous Pisan lecture and then in the masterpiece "The legal system" , it referred to the eruption of a series of social forces that demanded their recognition in the institutional setting: that 'crisis' was really an opportunity, because it led to the possibility of a reinvigoration of the institutional strength and the competitive enrichment of the requests. On the contrary, today we are experiencing a crisis that has nothing of that vivifying hypothesis that Romano saw in the folds of the mass parties and trade unions and their social struggles.
Democracy as a 'conflict' and as a competition evaporates, amidst the smoke of lockdowns and subsidies: total disintermediation, eradication of interests and intermediate bodies, clouding of perspectives and analyzes of citizenship, bent by the need for mere sustenance and adequately subsidized precisely so that it remains inert and silent. The public administration itself becomes only a guarantee tank for the survival of the hegemonic political classes. In fact, hearing about new hires in the public sector is not so different from the speech on subsidies, it must be said: and it is surprising that the proposal comes from members of a party that calls itself 'liberal'. It amazes and to some extent indignant not so much because it is or may be necessary to select 'public' excellences to manage the Recovery Plan projects, but only because the employees already in service then wonder what they are doing.
At this point, however, one could think of a hiring for each dismissal due to poor performance or inability to keep up with the times: a positive turnover not only generational but also based on actual skills and above all in line with the optimal performance of a given date. function. It won't happen, of course. Because maintaining the status quo is useful for all the above: for the income of electoral position and 'political' reference, for which the public administration does not provide services but simply guarantees income to those who are dependent on them, regardless of merit and actual capabilities. A subsidy too, in fact.
What to do then? Claiming the centrality of Parliament appears to be a noble but rhetorical exercise. Rather, the healthy competition of instances and interests should be revitalized, the construction of an active, aware, strong civil society capable of influencing the political debate: individualism is a sacred given but collaboration in the event of a crisis is even more so. . In this sense, the political classes must be prodded, and to goad them it must be shown that the King is naked. First of all, this free civil society organizes itself and begins to ask for an account, replacing the inertia of politics, of what has been done and not done up to now.
The judges are demonstrating that the time for patience and acceptance of 'exceptional' measures is over: therefore, the damages are asked, recourse, contested, transparency is obtained, sovereign power is even more stripped. Technical bodies, media virologists, control rooms without democratic legitimacy are brought to trial when their declarations and / or their decisions cause damage. And finally let us understand how much the public hegemonic class depends on private income: without taxation, in fact, the public sphere, salaries, subsidies, incomes, pensions would not exist. To make it understood, get organized, say it, write it down, shout it out to politicians when they ask for the vote, channel the best proactive and intellectual energies towards initiatives such as Mercatus , to operate a radical tax exemption. Because if we are talking about a social contract, then we must imagine that there are obligations for both parties involved, for citizens but also for the State itself. Otherwise it is not a social contract but a mere coercive imposition.
The post From citizens to subjects: the nightmare of a subsidized society divided between hyper-guaranteed and forgotten appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/da-cittadini-a-sudditi-lincubo-di-una-societa-sussidiata-e-divisa-tra-iper-garantiti-e-dimenticati/ on Mon, 12 Apr 2021 04:03:00 +0000.