"We need a bit of Trumpism": Anger and Resentment in Austerity Italy (original) (raw)
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According to Paul Berman, the events of 1989 were a consequence and, in some ways, an “achievement” of the protest movement of 1968; or they at least expressed the most deeply felt aspirations of a generation of “utopians.” It is not my intention here to examine and discuss Berman’s thesis in detail, but rather to highlight its originality and look for any possible historical or conceptual connections between the events of 1968 and those of 1989. The Italian case seems to lend itself particularly well to such a comparison.
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Work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non commercial-Share alike 3.0 Italian License BOOK REVIEWS Alteri L. and Raffini L. (Eds., 2014), La Nuova politica. Mobilitazioni, movimenti e conflitti in Italia, Edises, Napoli, pp. 224. Over the last several years, people have occupied squares and parks around the world. Those place names-Syntagma, Puerta del Sol, Zuccotti Park and Tahrir and Taksim Square-evoke a politicization that has emerged out of a gloomy, multidimensional crisis. A plight that many people are harshly experiencing while few are profiting (Wilson J., Swyngedouw E. 2014). Unfortunately, no public space in Italy has been associated with those international spaces around which this new and vibrant political terrain has been glimpsed. An Italian political ecologist, I believe in the urgency of the politicization of the debate about the future of Italy and Italians with regard to: the current levels of economic stagnation; the increasing impoverishment of large parts of the population; and the varying degrees of ecological disaster the nation faces. Indeed, previously with Berlusconi, and now with Renzi, the Italian politics is staging almost perfectly the post democratic scenario described by Collin Crouch at the beginning of the 21 st century. A scenario where the standard procedures of the liberal democracy run as usual, but actually the citizens have little to say on what the governments decide at one with economic elite. Post democracy is the theoretical starting point of Luca Alteri and Luca Raffini, the editors of " La Nuova Politica. Mobilitazioni, movimenti e conflitti in Italia". With the help of six researchers in sociology and political science-Bulli G., Caruso L., Castelli Gattinara P., Forno F. Giorgi A. and Piazza G.they try to excavate the Italian mobilizations and social struggles in order to let the political emerge, even in the absence of an Italian evocative squares or parks at international level. This ensemble of authors analyses a series of experiences that have occupied significant spaces in the Italian socio-political arena for the last few decades. They show how a new politics in Italy is trying to make room for going beyond the liberal democratic model. The authors set their ambitions high; they aspire to retrace the origins and the features of important experiences of participative mobilizations from the bottom up. They look to connect those experiences with international movements and mobilizations. As the editors clearly highlight on their book's cover, even if the forms and the places of what they call the New Politics are brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk
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In Pier Giorgio Ardeni's last work, the author proposes an analysis of the success of populism in relation to the level of inequalities, identified as the main propulsive of the growth of consensus among populist actors on the Italian scene. The proposed approach is multidisciplinary in nature and tries to integrate socioeconomic analysis with political analysis to offer a exhaustive explanation of the populist success in Italy. The hypothesis advance is that, as discontent, social unrest and levels of inequality growth, populism strengthens (see Rosanvallon, 2017) until it reaches positions of power. The originality of the work is tied not only to the theoretical hypothesis, but also to the methodology adopted: for the empirical verification, the author proceeded to trace the socio-demographic and economic profiles of the inhabitants of the lower territorial levels, that is the municipalities, taking as reference the ISTAT data coming from the registry offices to intersect them with the electoral results. The aim is to shed light on the connection between unequal income distribution, territorial gaps and voting behavior in the different areas of the country. In the first chapter of the work, attention is focused on the historical reconstruction of the underlying causes of the increase in inequalities in Italy. After the economic boom that culminated in the early 1990s (see Toniolo, 2013), the Italian economy underwent a sudden slowdown, until the recession of the 2000s during which real per capita income produced returned to the levels of twenty precedent years. The survival of Italian companies, over the years, has increasingly been tied to a progressive decrease in wages rather than to a series of product and process innovations-stimulated by public and private investmentscapable of increasing the added value of production (see Montoroni, 2000; Felice, 2005; Carreras and Felice, 2010) and the total factor productivity (TFP, indicator that measures the degree of economic efficiency of the system in it's complex). Furthermore, growing inequality has been accompanied by a reduction in social mobility (see Lipset and Bendix, 1991; Sorokin, 1998; Breen and Breen, eds. 2004) and class mobility, elements that contribute to the widening of social gaps that pockets of discontent are swelling. Another central theme of the first chapter is that concerning education. The author highlights, based on the last OECD data, that Italy has a low level of qualified and specialized education compared to the average of European countries. The percentage of people with only a primary or lower secondary school certificate is around 40%, only Spain and Portugal have higher figures. Tertiary education is achieved by only 17.7% of Italians, compared with a European average of 33.4% and an OECD average of 36.7%. On the basis of what is expressed in the report, it also emerges that Italy is one of Work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non commercial-Share alike 3.0 Italian License
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