There is a lot of talk about change without indicating paths and goals that are understandable to the majority of citizens. Over the last 60 years, Basilicata has undergone transformations, some of them profound, imposed by the “world above”, by exogenous pressures and by national and international economic and political powers allied with the local government apparatus. Therefore there has been a change, an unstoppable process of “alteration” and modification of the material and immaterial structures that are the basis of society, the economy and politics in a given historical period. Change is therefore a process of transformation, of modifying things. And it needs its own clean ecology and its own participatory vector system which has not existed for over 30 years. “The world below” pays the costs.
Now, we can safely say that change exists regardless: everything changes, everything transforms, regardless of our will. The problem therefore is whether social actors, individual citizens or associates, participate or not in the processes of change, orienting them, deciding their direction and objectives. Thus establishing the forms and substance of a collective destiny.
In Basilicata this has not happened, except in some segments of social, political and economic life and in some sections of its recent history. I think of Scanzano 2001. However, it also happened, but in a passive form, in the sense of unconscious complicity, when the myth of oil equaling wealth and wild industrialization equaling work and employment was born. The local population simply gave consent to these transformations by clinging to myths that soon proved false. I am thinking of the chemical industry settlements in Val Basento and Tito, in the 60-70s and more recently the automotive industry in Melfi, as well as the oil industry. External and, in many respects, extraneous interventions. Consider also the fact that to have the University it was necessary to have an earthquake with many victims. All these events did not have anything to do with a democratic and popular plan for conscious change. Neither Lucanian politics nor society have become protagonists of a shared, participatory project for the transformation of Basilicata towards better living conditions for all its citizens and for the protection of its natural heritage. And this is because the processes of change need vision, a planning imagination of the future. Not promises to get elected.
That said, we need to be careful when talking about change, especially in political discourse. Vito Bardi and his centre-right wanted change: with respect to whom, to what, to go where? This was never clarified, also because that perspective was based on rhetoric. So much so that we found ourselves faced with palliative measures (see gas bonus) and simply demonstrative actions (see the approach to public tenders) or even pejorative ones (see healthcare and depopulation). We found ourselves faced with a change that is always the same, a change that does not change. This applies to Bardi and the governments of the last 30 years. We can instead talk about small steps (forward and backward) which have transformed very little of the economic, social, cultural, political and administrative structures of a Basilicata which remains immobile even if it apparently moves. There are phenomena, for example depopulation, that you cannot reverse in a year or five years, even worse if you plan to fight them with palliative policies.
In this electoral campaign, listening and reading the speeches of the candidates at all latitudes and longitudes of the forces in the field, we continue to play on the words “change” and “turning point”. Upon closer inspection, for them change is nothing more than a dichotomous thought that separates “right and left”, and vice versa, in a hypothetical field between worse and less worse. In the usual way, “you take it off and I’ll put it on”. This dynamic played even within the same teams such as remove Bubbico and add De Filippo, remove De Filippo and add Pittella, has produced no more or less the same changes that Bardi left us: nothing or little or worse, depending on the spheres involved . And this will happen again with Marrese or with Bardi bis or with anyone else.
The themes and promises contained in the propaganda speeches of these weeks have nothing to do with any change that is truly profound and radical. Because Basilicata doesn’t need those who promise thousands of jobs, or helicopters, or free transport for students or the reduction of waiting lists, etc. We have heard them many times, assuming they are true. Basilicata needs radical, revolutionary transformations. The mendings, the patches, the palliatives don’t work. And this takes years, many years. We need capable and aware citizens who elect not one but many equally capable, intellectually honest, courageous representatives, without small or large conflicts of interest. We need a counter-hegemonic project that aims to subvert that set of power alliances and interests nested everywhere in politics, the economy and the institutions. And this cannot happen if we continue, directly or indirectly, to provide consensus to those alliances, which are always successful, whether they are on the right or on the left or built transversally. It’s time to create a broad consensus around a real project of transformation within a new ecology of politics and change. It’s possible? The debate is open, we’ll talk about it after the elections. Today the hypothesis is that nothing will change in the absence of an abstentionist shock. I understand the reasons of those who will go to the polls, and I hope that those reasons are right, I respect them. Simply, this time, I don’t agree with them. Unlike the regional elections, I will go to vote in the municipal and European elections. Best wishes to the voters and a hug to the conscious abstentionists.
Tags: Basilicata change brick dance moves moving
