WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY News Journal Update - (en) Italy, UCADI FA #180 - Italians overwhelmed by the "spectator effect" (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 

Many wonder how it is possible that after more than a year of fascist
government nothing seems to shake the country, described by this year's
Censis report as a land populated by sleepwalkers, blind and indifferent
to what is happening around them. And in fact, upon closer inspection,
this is a palpable impression in a country that is preparing to lose 8
million people of working age in the next 25 years. Looking at the
objective data on the birth rate, it is completely clear that the
country of Italy is in decline, while there is a palpable resignation
regarding the inevitability of war and a possible distancing from what
exists around us. No one certainly wanted the country's involvement in
the war in Ukraine, yet it was clear to everyone how little the opinion
of the majority of society matters; the collective response was that we
learned to live with the war. The arrival of Covid was the equivalent of
the passage of a swarm of death in the country and also showed those who
did not want to understand how fragile and uncertain the future is and
how little can be done to plan for it. The response was individual and
resulted in the personal search for those who were able to find a slice
of daily well-being in living day to day.
If we look around, they tell us that there is a record number of people
employed, but the growth in living standards is languishing. In fact, it
is regressing, and this is because inflation is growing and poor wages
have increased exponentially: you struggle, you work and you don't earn,
you have no guarantee of being able to make it to tomorrow. So you take
refuge in the search to satisfy at least individual rights and those
linked to new families, to new fragile aggregates of solidarity, which
are not only made up of rainbow or extended families, but also, more and
more often, of forced cohabitations, because you don't have the house or
you can't keep it. You try to treat yourself as best you can and if you
don't succeed you give up and at least hope to be able to die without
suffering, despite the fact that a foolish and insensitive policy
prevents you from doing so, considering self-induced euthanasia a taboo,
but not that which it produces socially.
The various segments of society are fragmented and incommunicable, among
themselves and within themselves. and the solution is always individual.
proof of this is the discomfort of young people with respect to a
society that is not growing and the lack of prospects for improving
their living conditions which are faced and resolved with dissent
without conflict which resolves in escape, in emigration, in the belief
that everywhere is better than in Italy.

Rampant sleepwalking or Genovese syndrome

If we just look around, the prevailing sensation is that of the
dominance of a growing irresolution that involves everyone on a
generalized level: many people lack the awareness that a war with no
holds barred is being fought between capital and labor and that capital
has won, leaving on the field the remains of what was its antagonist
class, the working class, which had emerged resized, transformed and
deported to other countries and other geographical areas, from the main
clash that occurred in the advanced capitalist countries. Globalization
was not only a phenomenon characterized by the frenetic circulation of
goods, but also a phase of class struggle in which the working class was
externalized by large production areas that constituted the heart of the
class conflict. The deportation of labor-intensive production activities
to other countries, such as the movement in the steel cycle, completely
outsourced to newly developed countries, has moved the working class to
other territories where it was necessary to create the organization from
scratch of class, without the support of the historical memory of the
knowledge of the production cycles which makes the working class a
conscious entity that knows the processes and is able to govern them.
While this gigantic shift in activity was taking place, the working
class of advanced countries, including the Italian one, saw its
bargaining capacity progressively reduced due to the diminished role in
carrying out productive activities, the introduction of remote and
remote working. and therefore lost political capacity for organisation,
representation and planning of a social and life strategy, of a
collective project for a future society. Thus, the hope of a better
future was lacking, strengthened by the ignorance of the parties of the
left who find nothing better than to embrace the current phase of
capitalist development, in the illusion of governing it and managing to
direct its political and social outlets, to the point of applying to
manage it.
As far as Italy is concerned, this phase even has a precise beginning
that can be identified on 2 June 1992, when Mario Draghi, then director
general of the Treasury, boarded the Britannia, the chartered yacht of
the royals of England.
It is no coincidence that as an emblematic location, hundreds of bankers
were present to announce that Italy was ready to sell off its assets of
state industries to hook up with Europe and finally free its economy
from the presence of the state.
Under the watchful and interested eye of Goldman Sachs' emissaries,
Draghi gave an introductory speech to the operation, in which he took
care to clarify that there were four reasons for privatizing the public
assets of the Italian state: reducing public debt, increasing
productivity , improve and consolidate Italy's credibility on the
markets, and all in order to allow the country to return to the
Maastricht parameters.
Thirty years later the public debt exceeded 2,755 billion; Since 2001,
Italy has had the lowest productivity among industrialized countries
(OECD data) and in the last 20 years productivity has fallen by 5%,
while real incomes have decreased by 3.8% compared to an increase of
50%. of Germany; Italy also holds the record for the lowest wages.
Despite the privatisations, overall growth has not exceeded 2% and even
recently the country entered into its latest debt financing, borrowing
at very high rates. The Italian economy is increasingly an appendage of
the German one. and now that this is in crisis, the prospects for the
country's economic growth are more uncertain and unlikely than ever.
These facts, although unspoken, are known to all and influence
individual and collective behaviour, pushing people to make do rather
than pursue rational strategies to improve their living and working
conditions. By mixing freedom of action at an individual and collective
level, personal abilities and social needs, yes
they implement individual micro strategies that cannot be placed within
an overall strategic plan of a social nature whereby everyone tries in a
disorganized and chaotic way to draw their own path of survival, in
search of well-being, individual and family wealth, at the most
extensive to their own small business, looking for the only solution
that seems possible, the individual one with the aggravating
circumstance that in the last year this mechanism of promotion and
social mobility also seems to have worn out.
In the absence of a common and shared objective, we cling to small
claims, of little effectiveness and practical effects, without
considering in any way the role that could be played by collective
action. In this bleak picture, study and personal commitment lose their
meaning as an indispensable requirement for the improvement of
well-being, living conditions, quality of participation in the
collective management of problems. The lack of clarity in the analysis
of problems transforms major ethical and political issues, such as
ethnic or religious conflicts, into an indistinct tangle to resolve
which everything and the opposite of everything is proposed.
It is clear that both the public and private sectors lack the ability to
make decisions and propose solutions and, even more so, adopt reforms
and trigger production processes and investments. Pandemic and health
and care problems, energy and environmental crises, wars on the edges of
Europe, inflation, migratory flows, the prevalence and affirmation of
development models different from the Western one, the worsening of
demographic problems and new social protection needs, appear as problems
that overwhelm us, crush us, with respect to which we are collectively
unable to develop strategies, taking refuge in the individual response,
which can only be necessarily weak and insufficient.
Yet public and private investments would be necessary to secure the
territory and infrastructure. The energy transition has passed the first
stage of arrival and it is clear that a balance is needed between
security of supply, technological innovation and reduction of the impact
of activities industrialists, provide a solution to the problem of high
energy prices.
Instead, the most absolute inertia prevails and only occasionally does
some mediatized event cause a jolt of emotional reaction which leads to
a collective commitment, which produces a sudden re-emergence of
sensitivity and social conscience, soon submerged and watered down by
the routine of media announcements of events used from politics as tools
of mass distraction, designed to divert attention from real problems,
which on the other hand appear difficult and burdensome to deal with and
therefore fall victim to collective mental laziness, without wanting to
realize how much the country is submerged by its backwardness and its
delays. A country cannot live on very short-lived emotions, be afraid of
confrontation, stop every time there is a difficulty to face,
questioning and dividing itself on the things to do, even when these
concern essential common sense interventions to correct the effects of
an individualistic drift, of gender discrimination, of class differences
that affect the weakest and most marginalized fringes of the population.

The demographic transition

We cannot understand what is happening around us if we do not start from
the fact of the aging population and the birth crisis which produces the
transformations we see before our eyes and of which the medium-term
dynamics are most evident. Profound differences characterize the ways in
which societies made up mainly of young people think collectively and
behave in tackling problems compared to a social context made up mainly
of advanced people. While the former look to the future and resort to
the hope of a different and better world to be built, the others, those
who send you over the years, have the prospect of enjoying what they
have built for better or for worse because they feel that the time
available does not it is very EThe social mechanisms that allow rapid
and possible changes are more unlikely than ever in a society that has
lost the presence of social elevators. The same young people today are
aware that their situation will not be better than that of their
parents, that their pensions will be lower than the current ones, I said
that they will never be able to enjoy them, they know well that the
future is uncertain and these are objective data which are outside their
reach as it has the possibility of change and therefore their reaction
ends up being a turning in on themselves in search of an individual
escape from the announced disaster.
To complicate matters, they know that society is rapidly transforming,
moving and evolving ever faster, thanks to information technology which
is both a powerful tool for transforming everyday life and a tool for
creating a virtual environment that offers itself as a substitute of the
real one and which, more than the real one allows or seems to allow, the
realization of needs and desires, delivering to the imagination
compressed by reality, desires realized even if only virtually, but
which allow one to have a space in which to live and develop, imagining
a possible future and realizing desires and needs in a virtual reality.
Strong social processes with a collective dimension have given way in
favor of the disorderly and non-convergent multiplication of
micro-behaviours, and if the imagined or introduced interventions
respond to a logic of pure proliferation of individual claims, when fear
does not take over and impose itself, the fear of a future that appears
uncertain and with indefinite and indefinable contours constitutes a
more than real outcome, contributing to shaping a country that is
increasingly in disarray, devoid of a collective and supportive
community vision. The changes that reality inevitably imposes, with the
unraveling of time and events, will inevitably destroy and rebuild
social structures and meanings, but the structure that these will assume
appears extremely vague and uncertain.

The role of work

To try to start again there seems to be no other way than to become
aware that the attribution of meaning of young people (and not only
them) towards work has changed, with a substantial reversal compared to
the distant, as well as the recent past. The role of work as an
expression of the vocation and development of the person and the
community appears today to be reversed and is silently bringing about a
restructuring of social structures. The inclusion of robotics in
productive activities, often replacing manual work, suggests the
possible hypothesis of a reduction in working time in order to allow
greater space for people's recreational and creative activities. This is
a complex and delicate process, because it presents notable
contradictory aspects, first of all the difference in the application of
new production processes between the different areas of the planet and
the therefore proliferation of areas with different rates of development
technological and in the use of new production methods, therefore the
spread of an increasingly unequal world between productive and social
areas and islands. In other words, we are faced with a society which,
rather than starting a new cycle, is replacing the development model
built starting from the 1960s, which advocated letting things happen,
the coverage of essential needs, the recognition of identities and
collective rights, with a new model in which letting be is ensured, the
autonomous possibility - especially for the younger generations - to
interpret work, investments, social cohesion without collective
constraints, in the protection of private microcosms built on personal
claims: a clear direction perhaps towards possible economic growth, but
with few strategic goals in a public debate empty of ideas and words,
characterized by the reversal of the meaning of some great collective
invariants and some powerful social processes: the triumph of an
individualistic capitalism to a mature and final phase.

The Editorial Team

https://www.ucadi.org/2023/12/20/gli-italiani-travolti-dalleffetto-spettatore/
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