The crisis of work as a value: a cornerstone of Western civilization threatened by globalist ideology
What happened last May 1st is in many ways truly paradoxical and perhaps deserves some small consideration. I am not referring to the utterances, decidedly out of place, made on the occasion of the traditional Roman concert by the "rapper" Fedez , but rather to the fact that on the anniversary of the Labor Day everything was talked about except work. As if at Christmas there was no talk of the birth of Jesus or at Ferragosto there was no talk of holidays. Moreover, if there is a theme that should be at the center of public debate today, it is precisely that: we are in the midst of an epochal crisis in employment, aggravated by the measures adopted to combat the pandemic. A crisis that has gripped our country for more than a decade, which for the first time since the post-war economic boom began an economic and social decline that made everyone (except a few elites) poorer and therefore less free to build. their own life, and to help improve that of loved ones.
The economic and social decline is accompanied (perhaps it is the effect, but more likely it is the cause) an equally heavy cultural decline, which consists in the loss of some of the fundamental values that in the past years had contributed to development, economic but not only that, in a positive sense of Italian society. Among these lost values, one of the most important is precisely that of work, and what happened last May 1st is only a disturbing sign of this drift.
The value of work is typical of modern Western civilization, because only in Western culture is it considered a way for human beings to express and realize the individual personality by putting their skills to work. In other cultures, work represents a sort of "necessity" (at the same time material and social) that imposes itself from the outside on those who perform it and that is coupled with the equally rigid bond that inserts individuals into family, tribal structures , clientelists, locals, etc. This is not only (still today) true for non-Western cultures, but it was also true for societies of classical antiquity. Plato, as is well known, distinguished the population into priests (philosophers), warriors and "workers", who represented the lower class being constrained in all their ways of life (and not only in those strictly working) from the other two groups, called to direct and defend the city-state. The situation was not very different in ancient Rome, where the "optimized" citizens did not work or were entrepreneurs in the modern sense of the term, but contributed to the life of the res publica with military activities, civil and political assignments, participation in forensic debates and activities carried out on behalf of the rulers (procurement of taxes or ration supplies) or of the remaining population (public performances). This vision of work as a sort of external "weight" destined almost to crush human life was also clearly expressed by another of the traditions that are at the origins of our society, the Jewish one: as everyone knows, in the book of Genesis it is he speaks of Adam who, expelled from the earthly Paradise, is condemned to work "with the sweat of his own brow".
The way of looking at work began to change only in Latin Christianity which (especially under the influence of the thought of St. Augustine), in transforming the condemnation of Adam's "original sin" into an opportunity for eternal salvation into of divine grace, he transformed, albeit slowly and amid a thousand contradictions and more or less serious deviations from the principle, also the work of punishment weighing on the human condition into opportunities to improve the existence of men. This conception was initially adopted above all by the monks, linked to the Benedictine rule "ora et labora" , for whom work was a form of free and voluntary asceticism aimed at perfecting the personal relationship of the individual with God. But this form of asceticism, after centuries of "incubation" in the cloisters, at the beginning of the modern era it was secularized and brought into the secular world, giving life to the work ethic intended as a way to improve (both in a spiritual and material sense) both the life of individuals that society in general. As is well known, it was Max Weber who first described this historical development speaking of the Protestant professional ethics as the basis of the "capitalist" industrial society, even if in my opinion the discourse must be made for all forms of modern Western Christianity, which ( albeit with many and profound differences also in this matter) they recognize themselves in this vision of working activity.
For his part, the man who is considered the father of modern political economy, Adam Smith, affirmed that the value of the goods produced is given by the quantity of labor incorporated in them, and that the capital itself to be reinvested can only be considered as a set of accumulated and monetized work. Karl Marx, taking up Smith's concepts, but overturning them from a collectivist point of view, condemned capitalist property, meaning it not as the fruit of one's own past labor, but as an undue appropriation of the "surplus value" of the present labor of others. All the relationships and social conflicts of the last two centuries in Western societies have focused on this theme: how to ensure that work can perform its function of improving both the individual life of those who perform it and the collective one, and what role they must carry out the public powers to achieve this goal.
In the context of liberal-democratic systems, the solutions, as is well known, have been different according to the different civic cultures, more oriented to letting free "market" bargaining between individuals in Anglo-Saxon countries, more aimed at favoring a collective “social” intervention (state or not) in European-continental ones. In totalitarian regimes (German National Socialism, Soviet Communism), on the other hand, work, exalted in words, was subjected to the directives of the dominant single parties and returned to be considered as an external imposition for individuals: even in this, those regimes proved to repudiate the principles of Western civilization.
Even if the practical achievements have not always been up to the principles and too often work has been synonymous with the exploitation of man by man, Western culture has never lost sight of the "high" meaning of work (not only of dependent work, but equally of entrepreneurial work at all levels). The Italian Constitution itself (art. 1), also inserting itself in the continental vision that favors the "social" point of view, affirms as everyone knows that the Republic is "founded on work".
As for the May Day celebration, and the similar one on the first Monday of September held in the United States and in other countries of Anglo-Saxon tradition, they have always reflected, together with sometimes exaggerated political and social claims, this vision of human work as well. aimed at self-realization and not only economic development of society (for our Constitution see art. 4). This is why the current silence is all the more striking, as if the mass and social media no longer had an interest in talking about work and its crisis, as if there was nothing left to discuss on the subject. This is not born now: for decades it exalts now unemployed (jobless society), that is a society where the work activity (work, to stay the English terms) would remain but would lose any social role (job) eventually be fully instrumental to the decisions of the increasingly powerful global financial and media elites. And above all to the claim that many of the exponents of these elites cultivate to lead everyone towards collective well-being and equity, in a global game of downward equality which, instead of improving the working conditions of developing countries, penalizes and it risks completely destroying not only the achievements and claims of employees, but also the autonomy and the capacity for innovation of entrepreneurs in Western countries.
A game based on two aspects of the globalist ideology which, despite the apparent opposition, represent the two sides of a single coin, and which are always combined in the actions of these elites: economic liberalism and social goodism, which like all things made absolute they end up degenerating into their opposite, liberalism into rigid dirigisme (the example is the evolution in this sense of the economic freedoms of the European Union) and do-gooders into a selective discrimination between different identities ( represented for example by the rigid systems of identity “quotas” in the assumptions).
The effects of all this are there for all to see: in our country emigration to foreign countries has been resumed for years, which had almost ceased in the 1980s, while, vice versa, the irregular immigration of people to whom it cannot be offered. a job that does not exist, and which therefore cannot (even when they want to) integrate, ends up damaging both residents and immigrants themselves. The current levels of poverty are in many ways dramatic and it seems that a society of a few rich people is being built in charge of managing a mass of poor or semi-poor, destined to become their "customers" in the ancient Roman sense of the term. A dramatic situation that stands out even more thanks to the media silence on these issues.
Don't get me wrong: it is right to have the deepest respect for the ongoing debate (both for favorable and opposing opinions) on the Zan bill, which I personally consider useless to protect the people (already protected) who want defending and potentially dangerous for the freedom of expression of everyone's thought, but not talking about the current problem of work in our country not even on May 1st is really a serious thing. One would almost compare the reality of today with what happened in Constantinople in the fifteenth century where, when the armies of the Ottomans were already marching towards the city, the Byzantine theologians (who represented the cultural elite of the ancient empire) passionately and controversially discussed sex. of the angels, just as today we discuss the "gender" of human beings.
It would therefore be desirable, at least in the opinion of the writer, that these issues were put aside for a moment, especially on the occasion of anniversaries such as that of May Day, which should be an opportunity for profound reflections on what caused the crisis in employment. (employee, autonomous and entrepreneurial) in Italy and on what remedies could be useful to put an end to the current decline and to "restart", perhaps by virtue of a culture of free and responsible individual work and not linked to the values of globalist ideology and politically correct, the economy and not just the economy of our country.
The post The job crisis as a value: a cornerstone of Western civilization threatened by globalist ideology 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/la-crisi-del-lavoro-come-valore-un-cardine-della-civilta-occidentale-minacciato-dallideologia-globalista/ on Tue, 11 May 2021 03:52:00 +0000.