Left without compass

Nicola Zingaretti's interview on the Corsera reopens with some promising pbadages a debate in the Democratic Party that started so badly that he regretted the long desperate post-election silence. For Veltroni, something happens that the left does not want to see: maybe he has the right glbades, but does not remove them. For Prodi, it takes a new thought: to articulate it, to think of something else. Calenda has rather and since the media is the message that he entrusts to the paper: the Democratic Party must be dissolved in a republican front against populism, based – like populism – on the "right of fear ". Until here, parts of Leu, we can go from the call to Grbado's courage at the invitation to start talking about capitalism (but meanwhile no one starts) pursuing "from the left "sovereignty (without nation-state) no rights). This is not an badysis of defeat, it is the stuttering of a left that has lost not only its people but also the coordinates of time and language to inhabit it.

Alessandro De Angelis rightly pointed out a few days ago that we should at least start from Gramscian's warning to grasp the core of truth contained in the opponent's thesis, in order to fight him in declining it differently. Unfortunately, however, the aforementioned debate tends to confuse this core with its effect – fear – and with the recipe that the right proposes to appease – sovereignism – and without even denying it so differently. But the real core is elsewhere, and few are ready to face it even if the opponent puts it on the table without much compliment.

We take the interview to Alexander Dugin recently published by the Huffington Post. Whether or not Dugin "Putin's Rasputin", as the title says, what he preaches is indicative of the spirit of the times that hangs over the international network of national-populism to which Salvini explicitly signs in the aim of bringing down the "Brussels Wall". In essence, the Russian ideologue of the "fourth political theory" supports three things. The first: the twentieth century is over and to get out, we must bury its three main ideologies and related historical practices, communism, fascism and liberalism. To this end, our counterpart to the synthesis "between left-wing cultural Marxism and right-wing liberal economic doctrines", in its hegemonic judgment of the last thirty years, the synthesis "between the left-wing economic-social theory and the traditional values ​​of right". 19659002] The second: after the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War, Russia continued to be subjected to undue pressure and ostracism by the West and it is now that she finds her "dignified place" in the world, aiming at a "Eurasian union" based on the sovereignty of peoples (it is not known if they are identified on a national, regional or ethnic). The third: the populisms that proliferate in the United States (Trump), in Europe (Alternative fuer Deutschland, Marine Le Pen and Dugin also Melanchon) and especially in the workshop "avant-garde" Italian, are already the realization of the QTP: neither right nor left, express the reaction of the people against the liberal elites, a reaction that mixes demands for social justice and conservative values ​​and against which it is vain to oppose anti-fascist (left-wing) and anti-fascist flags. anti-communists (right)

. It is clear that this speech can make a lot of chips (on its well established roots in the evolution of the New Right from the 80s, other than the right or the left, on the caricature reduction of liberalism, as the argues Dugin, but neo-liberalism, which is a different story, a "synthesis of cultural Marxism and economic liberalism", on the archaic and identity conception of the people). But we are not here to make the chips of the philosopher, but to evaluate the effects of the ideologue. Which condenses a vulgate that becomes common sense even here in Italy, and unfortunately not just right.

The idea, for example, that the – necessary – revival of social rights is consistent with conservative values ​​and supremacist and racist drives (translated: that Salvini actually defends popular reasons, and that, in the name of that, we can turn a blind eye to his xenophobia, the securitaria and the fascistoid) is all but absent in the electorate that from left to right, and some intellectuals of communist ancestry. The idea that undisputed market dominance in globalization does not come without a restoration of national sovereignty (and therefore that Italians first, and what migrants will see) is an idea that circulates no only on the right but also on the left, in response to the myth of European supranationality, which proved to be subordinate to money and to spread. And we could go on

There is no way to find a compbad or a terrain discriminator without facing the heart of the problem. It is an interpretation of what happened in the world, geopolitically, economically and ideologically, from 1989, an alternative to the version that circulates the different copies of Dugin, Bannon, Fusaro, Salvini and others. Which means, for the left that was in government, to recognize the famous core truth of the thesis of the adversary: ​​to admit this blind faith in a supposed progressive spontaneity of globalization, the rejection of any criticism of capitalism and the Internalization of the neoliberal rationality was catastrophic for the left after-89. Where globalization means not only the unification of markets and the multiplication of inequalities, but also a new multipolar configuration of the world in which Russia, China and other powers now have the bill to the world. West in decline. And neoliberalism does not mean the intertwined interweaving of economic and political correctness that Dugin blames, like all right-wing media, for the "radical chic" left, but a form of rationality that has bent itself to the logic of the market and competition. the entire democratic building, from national and European institutions, to the citizen, who has become a strange two-sided person claiming "his" freedoms and "his" rights, on the other he invokes security policies to protect them from invaders; scapegoats, exteriors. Yes, it is useless to invoke the liberal-democratic orthodoxy or the republican fronts against populism by flying over the disfigurements of neoliberal democracy and its anthropological base that populism has paved the way.

The populist fever is not an antidote to neoliberalism the ideologues and their leaders want us to believe: it is the direct consequence, which configures an exit from the right based on the binomial social rights (for a few) – traditional values ​​(for all), the neo-sovereign prosthesis of declining states, peoples built on a nationalist and racial basis. It is left to chart another issue, based on another interpretation, self-criticism, neoliberal hegemony, and another political therapy.

Inequalities are not countered by waving the rights of "our" forgotten to the detriment of the other damned of the earth, but uniting the struggles of the exploited in the internationalist perspective proper to the Marxist tradition. Fears are not won by recognizing the right to be their prey, but by dismantling their almost ghostly roots and admitting that a risk rate is inevitable in open societies, and can only be eliminated in authoritarian regimes. The decline of the nation-state is not corrected with neo-sovereign and neo-nationalist masks, but with European and global policies and institutions of interdependence. People are not mobilized by simulating a compactness based in reality on the resentment of all against all, but by recognizing the clbad, gender and race divides and aligning them in antagonistic positions not on the establishment, but on what was formerly called the system.

Difficult, if not impossible, that the Democratic Party, or what will remain net of an additional exodus of Macronians, be able to badume an order of this kind of speech, which is not not absent from the proposal outlined by Zingaretti. But the Italian left is wider than the Democratic Party and is not destined to follow its destiny. And if you do, a twenty-seven year old from the South Bronx can not see why not even try it here.