by FRANCESCO BRANCACCIO, ALBERTO DE NICOLA, and FRANCESCO RAPARELLI
Following the events of October 15th the main challenge the Movement faces is to avoid being pressed in the grip of simplification and strict dichotomy, and at the same time to preserve its open and varied nature. We believe this risk has been outlined better than elsewhere in the editorial by Piero Ostellino published by Corriere della Sera. Ostellino uses the riots that took place during the demonstration to worn that there is no possibility of transforming the present beyond the choice between civil war or respectful reform of representative democracy and of the capitalist market rules
Tertium non datur. Even radical conflict, when it comes onto the scene, is bound to follow one of these two paths sooner or later, leaving behind any ambition to modify social relations.
Moving from this premise we believe that it is of crucial importance today, more that in the past, to explore in depth the concept of the political category going under the name of “alternative”, since this is what should occupy the position excluded from the game in Ostellino’s view. This imperative is easily understood: the historic phase we are experiencing is marked by the structural crisis of Neo-liberal capitalism, involving the foundations of the social and economic system as well as the institutional system, established in these past thirty years. This crisis is accompanied by a widespread awareness that it is not possible for anyone to turn back anymore. Discussion about the alternative is compulsory if we wish to seriously acknowledge the radical nature of this historic moment. This imperative is also, and this must be clear, very ambiguous: in fact the political category of the alternative summarizes a variety of meanings and different options, all potentially diverging.
1. The statue of revolt
An assumption we find useful to start from point is found in Fausto Bertinotti’s articles in Manifesto: the political and institutional dimension is currently locked into an enclosure with no way out. Within this enclosure, the direct expression of the financial governance (evident in the letters to the Italian government from the ECB), no truly alternative government practice is possible. Least of all is it possible the resort, way past the deadline, to political options attempting the rehabilitation of representative democracy, which has been in crisis for a long time and is currently forced to face the terminal phase of its decline. Only a “revolt”, if it were capable of breaking the scene of compatibility, would produce a rethinking of politics itself.
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(Thanks to Harsh Kapoor of SACW)