culture
twelve o’clock, March 30, 2021 – 11:06
We publish, courtesy of the publisher Feltrinelli, the opening words of the book-investigation on the new smuggling routes, the Sacra Corona Unita and the Balkans: a classic from 2003, updated in 2010, which has lost none of its relevance.
of Alessandro Leogrande
Back in bookstores from Thursday 1 April, reissued by Feltrinelli in his Universale Economica (pp. 216, euro 12), «Bad Lives. Stories of smuggling and multinationals», A book by Alessandro Leogrande published for the first time in 2003 by L’Ancora del Mediterraneo, then updated and republished in 2010 by Fandango. Alessandro Leogrande (Taranto, 1977 – Rome, 2017), journalist and writer, was deputy director of the monthly «The stranger”. Author of many important books for the fight against borders and shipwrecks, illegal hiring and ignorance, bad faith and injustices, he has collaborated with various newspapers including Rai Radio 3 and Corriere del Mezzogiorno, for which he wrote continuously from 2004 to death, writing editorials, reviews, inquiries and keeping the precious “Anni Dieci” column. Courtesy of the publisher Feltrinelli, we publish the dazzling opening of the book as a preview.
The crime is an extraordinary mirror of social transformations. It is never a delinquent activity as an end in itself, nor is it simply the manifestation of evil, illicit, fraud, violence. The facts concerning him never happen under the form of eternity.
Crime has to do with the production of money, its accumulation and redistribution. It has to do with the power relations inherent in the companies it crosses, with the palaces of political power, with the boards of directors of multinationals, with the internationalization of financial markets, with the de-localization of production, with the erosion of the functions of nation states, with the privatization of the world, with the slow process of deinstitutionalization of Western society and with the systematic “particular” occupation of what remains of the Palace. It often becomes a barrier to poverty and unemployment, and sometimes a lever for social ascent, the primitive creation of capital. It disrupts the balance of power, creating new ones. It uses new technologies and makes use of the abolition of borders. It often does so with unprecedented ease, anticipating the very dynamics of liberal globalization. Crime is a dynamic part of this globalization: the licit and the illicit economy become two sides of the same coin, united by the imperatives of the production of wealth, the deconstruction of the world of work, the pursuit of increasingly wealthy and unsustainable. Crime is the dirty side of the coin, but according to some it produces between 5 and 10 percent of world GDP. And what brings well-being is hardly questioned. It was like this in the last century, it is like this also in what we are experiencing.
When Pasolini wanted to deal with the mutation of the “underworld”, he adopted this as a metaphor for the more general transformation of Italian society. Through the mutation of the underworld, caught in the news stories concerning it, it was possible to see the anthropological mutation of the Italians. But it was also possible to see, in its making, a dramatic and irrecoverable fracture: while the Palace imploded in an attempt to preserve its oxidized balance, what was happening “outside the Palace”, in the news, was “infinitely newer, frighteningly more advanced “.
Today we must conclude that many of the prophecies cried out by Pasolini in the mid-1970s have come true. There was even that criminal trial he invoked so much in the last months of his life: most of the hierarchs of the time and of the subsequent eighties ended up behind the dock. But this did not prevent the breaking points from being mended, the Counter-Reformation advancing undisturbed, the Italian people applauding the grandchildren of those hierarchs. This did not prevent reality from becoming much more dramatic and complex than what Pasolini himself had prophesied.
Salvemini, Pasolini, Sciascia have provided in-depth analyzes of the corruption and dysfunctions of our society in the twentieth century, of the crime-economy-political relationship, of the metastases of the Palazzo and its bureaucracy. But to understand what is happening today before our eyes we can no longer rely on them, we must renounce the “comfort of the fathers” and proceed on our own feet, developing a critique of contemporary society that is at the height of the abyss that it has produced.
Today we can no longer speak of the Palace. It is a consoling metaphor, power is dispersed in every corner of the globalized society, its strengths are de-localized. They cross the places of politics, but they do not concentrate in these. Therefore, the crime-economy-political relationship is also de-localized, dispersed in the social fabric and in the creation of new powers.
March 30, 2021 | 11:06
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