Happy Birthday from Santiago de Chile
Three names were enough — Santiago, Italy, Nanni Moretti — to unleash the zombies of politics, of phrases with the effect of the type: “A sober, emotional and rigorous hymn to the value of memory”, as Walter Veltroni commented on the new film ( Santiago, Italy) by Nanni Moretti.
Of course it is not a film, rather it is a documentary of a trip to Chile 45 years ago; a fitting excuse to signal the political, social and cultural involution of today’s Italy; to express the hope that the Italians having been other, could tomorrow be again generous, passionate, supportive, as they were in the seventies.
At that time they were the protagonists of a history of international solidarity of which the main actors were those men united by the commonality of an ideal and by the passion for the common good that the Left represented at the time. In fact, once upon a time the Left was zealously committed to sublimating ordinary people with a better life, often in a radical way. It had dedicated itself to truly, genuinely and genuinely change the world, society, its structures, its institutions.
So the question is a must: where the Left has built a new way of life, facing for the first time in the history of humanity, unavoidable necessities such as health care, child care, the right to pension, work income and so on? These are the things that people need and want to see them realized, otherwise they ask the Right that runs to the rescue. As happened and still happens.
We live in a period of global economic stagnation, overwhelming inequality, global meltdown and, therefore, people have genuine, deep concerns about economic stability, the primary necessity for survival. However, the Left, or to be in the majority of it, does not seem at all disturbed, and therefore committed to responding to such anxiety with concrete answers.
In fact, you can read dozens of exciting articles every day, or attend many round tables, but almost never read or hear questions about why people would be entitled to complete public health care, because insulin costs a hundred times. what it should, because suicides are on the rise, as Durkheim divined a century ago, because the bourgeoisie imploded, because capitalism is failing, as Marx and Sartre predicted.
Of what happened in Chile I have very precise memories, because in that August of 1973 I was a young man sent to Santiago. I remember the growing malcontent of its inhabitants, the noise obtained by choking — cacerolazo — the empty pots with lids and ladles.
1973 was the year of the great disappointment of the Chileans, since the first positive phase of the Allende government, marked by significant growth rates (+ 9.0% in 1971 compared to 2.1% in 1970) from a a significant increase in real wages (+16.9% in 1971), was opposed to the final phase during which the situation precipitated. The gross domestic product collapsed by 5.6 percent, inflation exceeded 600 percent, the government deficit hit 25 percent, international reserves zeroed or nearly zero. Discontent spread and invested — as mentioned — all strata of the population.
Between the two phases there were twenty months during which the wide use of the public budget and of the public debt for redistributive purposes, the heavy taxation of the profits of the companies estimated as too large and the result of annuity positions, the ever closer relations with the Cuba of Castro, alarmed the United States that with sanctions and intimidation encouraged the countries of NATO to sever relations with Chile. These are the pages of history that Nanni Moretti recalls in his documentary.
The end of the Chilean experience is summarized in that photograph portraying a Salvador Allende with the helmet a bit ‘sghimbescio, a sweater with lozenges and a machine gun in his hand, and is taken while the military planes fly over the Moneda, the presidential palace . Forty-five years after the tragedy, every “left-handed” comment does not go beyond the memory. “For a generation of Italian children, Chile was a dream and a tragedy, a joy and a desperation”, (I quote Veltroni), and the speech ends here. Moretti’s “invitation” to speak about Italy is revealed. Yet the question to ask is simple: to “today’s kids” what future does it envisage?
It must be said right away, that the government left, in Italy as in Germany and in different measures throughout Europe, has crumpled into an aggressive and selfish individualism that does not take into account the fear of people returning to the old miseries, because they are crushed by logical economics of globalization.
However, the Left does not offer a collective platform able to develop valid proposals, capable of realizing a hope of inversion of course to which to cling. On the contrary, it puts aside the basic needs of the many to be enraged on the disquisitions of those who crowd — every day — the mornings and the television evenings, the front pages of the newspapers, just for the sake of appearing.
Yet there would be nothing to be invented to be really convincing. Thinkers such as Durkheim and Weber predicted the consequences of living in stratified and atomised societies, forced to confront the “disintegration” of the traditional consensus structures that built and spread democracy. It is a stunting malaise that leads to isolation, to the depression of the individual that causes the decay of democracy and its fundamental values.
Sartre and Adorno, Fromm and Bourdieu will later confirm this. They reaffirm that the capitalism that governs the world brings with it every single unease and draws up the list that goes from the anguish experienced for social disintegration, to mass impoverishment, to the rooting of a condition of perpetual precariousness for those who work. Which is why if today people vote for the Right and in Italy they are enchanted by characters like Matteo Salvini, it means that the Right has brainwashed everyone, or that the Left has become so estranged from its history and its values who can no longer talk to people. Therefore by voting on the right the common people paradoxically vote, from time to time, “against their own interests”, would say Carlo Marx.
Yet it would not take long to get her to the streets and fight for an economic policy that takes into account those values. Unfortunately, the premises can not be seen. Greetings people, best wishes. Best wishes.
