With “L’avvenire della memoria” (Egea), out on 2 May, the president of Museimpresa illustrates the challenge of inclusive capitalism and the adventure of entrepreneurship
In recent years, Antonio Calabrò has carried out a very useful job with his essayist activity: he told us about the changes in business culture, he mapped them with the stubbornness of the chronicler, he paid them the due homage and, above all, he inserted them in a cognitive framework. In summary he told us the traits of an industrial humanism that perhaps with our eyes alone we would not have recognized or even only we would not have evaluated with due importance. Calabrò is back in the bookstore these days with The future of memory
(Aegean)
an essay with an oxymoronic title that is closely linked to his other recent works such as The moral of the lathe e The reformist enterprise.
The protagonist is always the Italian industry and the author tells us about it in constant motion, perhaps better to say traveling, especially if understood as an “adventure of enterprise”. And it is precisely this path and this metamorphosis that give us the most complete sense of the transformation of the years that saw the full affirmation of pocket multinationals, the relay race between the parlor and fourth capitalism, the export boom, the advent of 4.0.
All slips linked together thanks to a profound cultural growth and a production of contents / symbols that has few rivals in the world. From this emerges a collective experience of intelligent manufacturing whose transmission cannot be entrusted only to the instrument of storytelling corporate (“presumptuous expression that suggests insincere propaganda”) precisely because it has the (broad) characteristics of what Calabrò defines inclusive capitalism. And in this case the adjective, full of meaning in itself, does not only cover the traditional socio-economic perimeter, but can easily be extended to the territories of science and creativity, to what “beautiful factories” show.
The future of memory it is a title that is obviously affected by the new role assumed by Calabrò as president of Museimpresa and has a declared objective: avoiding the risk of retrotopy, the growing attitude of placing the imagination of a better society in the past. An eternal golden age to quote Edoardo Nesi. Instead, the author ventures, those who open museums do so precisely to combat nostalgia, to build innovation. He intends to soar high and looks to the roots to have full self-awareness. And we could add he also does it, at least implicitly, to counter the thesis that our society would be preferable if it got rid of industry, its conditioning, its alleged arrogance.
Calabrò says that literature does not like business, that it the entrepreneur himself is frequently used with a strong charge of ambiguity. “Writers put everything about the entrepreneur into the world of money. And doing business often has dark, disturbing, negative connotations, he knows of plots and interests that are not clear ».
It can be added that everything the author he ascribes to literature, which is too often capable of distrusting the company, can be extended to a significant piece of the entire Italian intelligentsia and of journalism itself. Just devote yourself to a listless zapping of our talk shows or of the many Report to obtain an abundant review of clichés and ideological interpretations. To counter this mood negative Antonio Calabrò provides us with his maps, takes us to the archives and business museums that invest in memory, makes us leaf through the business magazines of yesterday and today, introduces us to the Piccolo Teatro di Milano, takes us to listen to the song of factory where the sound of an orchestra is combined with the rhythms of technological production.
But, and this is the reader’s first question, to what extent will this industrial humanism be able to counter the great discontinuities of the 1920s represented first by the pandemic and today by the disturbing return of war? Calabrò’s answer is reassuring. The crises are sharp, dramatic, painful but capitalism has strong roots in history and therefore appears to be able to adaptif not even reinventing oneself at the cost of “undoing knots that we had not known or wanted to undo”.
The second question instead concerns the relationship with the younger generations: how much of the extraordinary heritage of memory that Calabrò describes to us can we pass on to those who are the majority shareholders “of the future”? Too little, one would say. We organize a thousand visits to corporate museums, it comes to suggest. But let’s tear down that wall that continues to separate the school from the businesscomes to beg.
April 29, 2022 (change April 29, 2022 | 20:46)
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