We live in a two-sided world, the old world and the new world. Our disorientation is the result of fear of the future and the loss of roots, we convinced ourselves that we could do without memory, imagining that becoming modern implied the cancellation of every tradition. The reversal of this trend will depend above all on the ability to understand what is happening to us and therefore accelerate the construction of new and convincing cultural identities, because the answer does not lie in re-proposing ancient ideas sic et simpliciter but rather in a modern conception of political culture fruit of the most significant historical experiences of European culture, starting from that “deep connection” between social democratic culture and popular culture. Ultimately the central point is a conception of political cultures as something that is not immutable over time but whose evolution and encounter must be encouraged.
We are in a transition phase in which those in government are trying to keep up a system that is no longer capable of redistributing the very fruit of development, not even with the aim of fueling consumption as has always been done to remedy previous crises. We are in a paradigm shift.
The old world was made up of people making manufactured goods: capital was invested to produce goods which generated new capital on the market. In the second half of the eighteenth century the “industrial revolution” was born. The introduction and systematic use of cars they involved the concentration of paid labor in a single place, the factory. The new working system quickly established itself because it allowed strong reductions in production costs and very high profits. Then the old world invented another way to generate profits: transforming capital into “pieces of paper” capable of transforming into new capital. And finally it gave way to talented young people who, in the heart of the digital revolution, invented implicit work, what we do every day by clicking on the keyboard of our smartphone which produces significant economic advantages for them.
The new world is changing before our eyes and innovation is increasingly faster. The advent of digital has exploded the control function of production equipment (the first numerically controlled machines in industrial production), has generated the robotic transformation in the manufacturing industry but, above all, it makes the “instructions for manipulating the raw material ” (the definition of “information” in production used by Nobel Prize winner Paul Romer) the central role in the economic process of the digital age. The USA, first in the world in determining this “systemic rupture”, generated the first stirrings of the new economy based on “data” and on multinationals capable of building economic processes based exclusively on the process of “extraction”, “interpretation” and ” commercialization” of data which have reached, in that country, almost 30% of the national GDP and extract information on approximately 5 billion people in the world. The new economy, in which Europe not only has not had the ability to position itself, but which it still struggles to understand, is having a further phase of acceleration in recent months with the commercial release of the Generative Artificial Intelligences which herald an unprecedented impact on the form and distribution of work.
We live in a society where there are those who are above and those who are below. Those who are down today were also down before, that’s why it’s not a good idea to go back to “how we were”: we must emerge from the current phase with the prospect of a possible reversal of positions. We live in a pyramid society: based on an income ladder from the lowest to the highest. This corresponds to a graduation of power based, while respecting individual rights, on the principle of the strongest. We hoped that the crises we have gone through (pandemic, energy, climate), and that we are still going through, would make us change course, but we are aware that, on the contrary, they have made us regress.
Once the direct intervention of the State in the economy has been liquidated, the welfare state has effectively been abandoned and the “death of ideologies” has been decreed, communism has dissolvedleaving us a desert in which the survivors seek refuge in the mirage of an oasis, of a “place” inhabited by comedians and acrobats, a dangerous stage in which the crisis of thought is represented, as Edgar Morin wrote.
In this scenario the right, like a virus, has been capable of mutating: having entered the body of society it was post-fascist and secessionist, up to the rooms of Palazzo Chigi where it changed into a conservative and Atlanticist party.
In the search for an alternative, Senator Renzi has proposed creating a Center alliance. The political, popular and labor center (which without qualification is a road sign), it could unlock bipolarism on the condition of gathering significant electoral consensus. In the last century, the DC, due to its own ideological platform opposed to extremism, because it abused public power, was able to gain a central position, in the sense of exercising a mediating function by keeping in balance a political system characterized by different political components.
But we are talking about a page from the book of homeland history. The awareness of the changes affecting our society forces us to reflect on these pages, combining them with the reality in which we must operate. There is no doubt that beyond location, a new political project is needed, aware that another world is possible. We must go further, build a gathering of the formations available for the European elections and plan a new party. Because there’s no going back.
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