WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY News Journal Update - (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria: THE SOCIETY OF NEGLECT (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 We are surrounded by abandonment. The lack of attention towards the

world, towards ourselves, is the distinctive sign of this compressed
time, compressed into narrow coordinates and unable to see a
perspective: of change, of liberation. Degradation attacks us, in the
cities, in the countryside, on the roads; The fires spread, leaving
behind a black desert that creates a desolate and sad landscape; Waste
overwhelms us, with its obstinacy and persistence it occupies every
space, it sneaks in between the interstices; The water bombs hit a
concrete-soaked area, causing flooding and deaths. And where cleanliness
and precision are seen, it is only a superficial patina that tries to
hide the surrounding ravages, even the invisible and intangible ones.
All this is the result of carelessness, of a consumerist idea of the
world, of that disposable idea that seemed to make us absolute owners of
our destiny. And instead. Instead, even our bodies are now subject to
consumerist and commercial logic according to which everything can be
monetized and sold. Everything has a measure and a price: health like
any other need that we now categorically call a right. In this perverse
and exhausting game, if we are all losers, someone believes that they
are the custodian of a destiny, the necessary architect of an immutable
order and of enjoying unlimited and well-deserved privileges, so they
continue pushing towards the abyss, forcing a large part of the human
race to a hard and miserable life.

There was a moment in our recent past when all the distortions of the
dominant system, founded on the exploitation of all natural and human
energy, became evident and when it seemed that the incontrovertibility
of having to subvert everything had been understood. I am obviously
referring to the Covid 19 pandemic. However, once the storm has passed,
what remains is a generalized feeling of helplessness that implies the
common feeling and, paradoxically, the belief that science and power,
despite Everything, they are capable of facing emergencies. So that we
can continue down the same path: carelessness after carelessness, let
everyone work hard and may the best win.

However, there were those who, at the most acute moment of the syndemic
- of that condition in which health, the environment, society, the
economy are sinking into an increasingly dramatic and unsustainable
situation -, when widespread abandonment was taking its toll in the
death and elimination of social relations, he reacted not coincidentally
by remembering the condition opposite to the behavior of states and
governments: care. Taking care of oneself, one's own body, the
environment, and human relationships appeared - and appears - as the
only way out of the devastation and anguish of profit and competition.
This is how "The Manifesto for a Solidarity Society" was born, signed by
dozens and dozens of associations and groups. Care, not as a simple
service but as a political instrument of emancipation and social
transformation, had already entered feminist reflection in the 1970s.
And precisely as a political concept it was taken up in that manifesto.
In the preamble it was said: "A virus has put the entire world in
crisis: Covid 19 has spread in a very short time throughout the planet,
has led half of the world's population to self-imprisonment, has
interrupted productive activities, commercial and social. and cultural
activities, and continues to claim victims. Within the health and social
emergency we have all experienced the precariousness of existence, the
fragility and interdependence of human and social life.[...]Decades of
policies of cuts, privatization and corporatization of healthcare, of
profit-driven globalization, have transformed a serious epidemiological
problem into a massive tragedy[...]The pandemic has highlighted how a
system based on thought only market and on profit, on predatory
anthropocentrism, on the reduction of all living beings to a commodity,
is not capable of guaranteeing protection to anyone. The pandemic is
proof of the ongoing systemic crisis, the main evidence of which is
determined by the dramatic climate crisis, caused by global warming, and
by the gigantic social inequality, which has reached unprecedented
levels.[...]Nothing can be like before, for the simple reason that it
was precisely the first one that caused the disaster. Today more than
ever we must oppose a system that subordinates everything to the economy
of profit to the construction of a society of care, which is care of
oneself, of others, of the environment, of the living, of the common
home and of generations to come."The manifesto therefore hoped for the
overcoming of the capitalist system and the affirmation of a society
based on solidarity and mutualism that care, the distinctive historical
and anthropological character of women, would support and innervate.
What happened to all this? Unfortunately in today's public debate that
intuition is completely overtaken by the usual issues that occupy daily
information: the war, the PNRR, the budget law, the stability pact, etc.
Without having a minimally critical approach to these topics, on the
contrary they are presented as the only horizon within which we can
move. However, it is probably also true that proposing a radical
transformation of the dominant model would have required consequent
action, constancy and mobilization capable of permeating increasingly
larger strata of the population, of directing them towards a total
rejection of mercantile logic. This did not happen, and it did not
happen also because that project limited itself to enunciating
principles which paradoxically should have been implemented by those
against whom they were aimed: the governmental and non-governmental
institutions, with their legal apparatus, their rigidities, their
compromises. . In the absence of even the attempt to create pressure
from below, which was real and not supposed and superficial, which would
activate some reformist process.

Now, after this summer of 2023 which has continued to record peaks of
heat together with extreme atmospheric phenomena, in which the
senselessness of war and all the daily tragedies - migration, poverty,
injustices - are mechanically repeated, the "care" of our lives and what
surrounds us is increasingly necessary. But what fights should we have
and how should we conduct them? Perhaps choices should be made,
priorities put in place. Does it make sense to engage in a de facto
reformist path that ends up reproducing the circuit of consumption and
the market? The struggles for wages, to guarantee the so-called rights
(limited and compromising), to ensure the so-called social mobility, or
those to carve out a niche of well-being, healthy eating, respect for
the environment, the protection of minorities make sense, do they have a
future? And not only in the face of an irreversible climate crisis that
would seem to lead us towards disaster. Mechanisms and methods should be
rethought to ensure that we are able to present an overall vision in
which the issues are linked to each other and we can imagine (and begin
to practice) a change conducted from below and capable of renewing
society at its roots. Revolutions and social upheavals cannot be planned
on the drawing board but having awareness and clarity could be helpful.

Angelo Barberi

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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