There is a piece of news that is being broadcast by Repubblica in its Florentine section and that has a young horseman as its protagonist, as it is fashionable to define them today according to the lexicon of Orwellian newspeak. TO delivery man we will call it
A young man of 25 years lives in absolute precariousness with a salary of €350 per monthforced to live in a tent because he can’t afford anything else, and sometimes even condemned to skip meals.
This is what emerges from the interview that Repubblica dedicates to him and that transmits a very plausible and very coherent image of what he really is, beyond the ideological veil with which the civilization of cosmopolitan neoliberalism is usually presented, the civilization of the victory of capital over laborwe could also say, since that is what it is about.
since 1989 freedom did not win. Democracy has not triumphed, despite the hegemonic rhetoric that only seeks to glorify the Platonic cave in which we are locked up. In 1989 she won the contest.
The freedom of the market won, that is to say, it won the neo market cannibalism, which is then the power of the strongest to slaughter the weakest without interdiction. Serge Latouche, the degrowth theorist, talks about it with a happy expression of “free fox in free chicken coop“. This is perhaps the best possible definition of what competition, competitiveness really is, the neoliberal order that assumes the economic order as the only source of rationality and that refers everything to the presumed justice of the markets.
That justice that causes working conditions to deteriorate more every day in the context of what is defined as “progress”, and that that’s only for the ruling classes. Since for the dominated it is a true regression from every point of view.
The working conditions are the most plastic photograph of it and the most dramatic.
Because the story of the young delivery man from Florence is one of many.
It is the image that restores the working condition of many young people in the era of neoliberal globalization.
A tragic fact, of course, that adds to many others, which we also give an account of in our speeches.
Surely you remember those workers forced to urinate in bottles on the assembly line so as not to interrupt the electrifying rhythm of production. Or the story of that worker who died in a multinational factory and covered with cardboard, so that the other workers would not stop producing and would not interrupt the feverish cycle of capitalist production.
Soon, the working condition seems to get worse every day in the framework of capitalism.
And this also by virtue of those “reforms” that are such only for the dominant party, that day by day worsen working conditions. It doesn’t really matter if the government is right or left.
The right has always protected capital, not labor.
Of course, the novelty is that now the left is doing the same, completely betraying its own class, that of the workers.
In this sense, whether there is a right or a left, the order of capital always wins in the current balance of power.
What for de-emancipatory reforms will deconstruct the world of work and is going to make the lives of the youngest hell. In this sense, it could still be said that we must look carefully and share the events of those who live in the underground of Metropolis, to resume the beautiful image of Fritz Lang’s cinematographic masterpiece.
The underground inhabitants, the exploited, the forgotten.
Those who have never been occupied by the right and those who are no longer occupied by the left.
They they have no voiceThey have no representation.
They live on their own living flesh contradictions of global capitalism.
It is from them that we must start again so as not to transform what exists into our ideal, according to a beautiful formula that we owe to Dostoevsky.
RadioActividad – Flashes of everyday thought, with Diego Fusaro